


Crimson Hymns

by brilliantlyburning



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Beekeeping, Boxing, Demisexual Sherlock, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, First Time, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I swear, M/M, Mary is Not Good, Parentlock, Pining, Poetry, Post TAB, Post season three, References to Addiction, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Violence, but not quite the way you'd expect, moments of light and tenderness, no actual child endangerment, proposal, sensory processing issues, unhealthy coping methods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 16:21:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8807695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brilliantlyburning/pseuds/brilliantlyburning
Summary: He laid his head over John’s heart, eyes level with his silver-rough scar, and listened to the crimson hymns beating beneath the surface. He imagined flowers blooming in his own chest: veins weaving intricate patterns on petals of thin muscle engorged with blood, sinew for stems and tendons for roots—the flowers would be poppies, maybe (addictive) or foxglove (deadly yet useful)—twining gleaming blood-red around the porcelain bone of his ribs. In his mind’s eye the gruesome bouquet all tied together on the left side of his chest, the stems bound together in heartstrings and the flowers fed by the rhythmic contraction of ventricles. It’s yours, he imagined saying to John—from the vena cava to the mitral valve to the arteries it is yours.—Or, the Love Song of W. Sherlock S. Holmes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, loves! A few notes about this story: 
> 
> Please read the tags before jumping in! Child endangerment is a major theme for this story, even though it doesn't actually occur. There's also graphic depictions of drug use, unhealthy coping mechanisms, violence, and a BDSM scene with all of the consent issues that that entails. I swear there are moments of light as well.
> 
> If you have any questions/concerns, you can always contact me at brilliantlyburningtopieces@gmail.com or hit me up on tumblr [brilliantlyburning](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/brilliantlyburning). (I'm better known as [johnlockficrecommendations](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/johnlockficrecommendations), by the way!)
> 
> Comments and kudos are always, always appreciated! Thanks for reading.

After the cocaine and the morphine wrote a waltz in three-quarter time in his bloodstream, diamond-bright high notes and dark low notes interwoven to a crescendo, the poetry bled out of him.

A misbegotten autumn spent avidly reading every available volume of poetry in the library: that was what Sherlock blamed it on. He’d spent lovely dark October evenings reading, snug in an old jumper, until Mycroft had come home from university. Sherlock remembered the look of condescending amusement on his brother’s face as he had confronted him with the four poetry books sequestered under his bed—this, the look had said, _this_ is what you’re wasting your genius on?

Chemistry, physics, biology. Not astronomy. Not poetry. But with a needle in the crook of his arm, Sherlock found it curling through his mind like the tendrils of steam that rose from a cup of tea.

_Let us go then, you and I,_

_When the evening is spread out against the sky_

Sober, the lines were an annoyance; incongruous with truth or reality. Sentimental maudlin pathetic _wrong_. But during the nights they ached as the lines inscribed themselves in the marrow of his bones in stylized calligraphy, because each and every poem recalled to him John.

Two months. And every night the darkness had curled about 221b and fallen asleep. Too dark, too thick with light. The night too long. And so there were pills, powder, vials: _I have known them all already, known them all—_

And for what?

Two months since the catastrophe of Christmas, followed by the calamity of New Year’s; in the last three weeks he has only texted John, briefly. John had not initiated the conversation.

But that was—fine. Not good, obviously, but not _not good._ John had a wife. John had a child—a daughter, he reminded himself, no use being in denial—on the way. John was, particularly after the dubious cheer of the holiday season, in need of rest and relaxation; it was highly unlikely that he would find either of these at Sherlock’s side, and therefore it mattered not at all that Sherlock was in need of John.

_Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets—_

And examined bloodstains and bodies, not smoke rising insouciantly from pipes, Sherlock chastised himself. He sat in his chair, back pressed against leather, and stared at the ruby upholstered chair in front of him. If he closed his eyes, succumbed to the hum of cocaine in his bloodstream that almost, very nearly almost, mimicked the warmth of human interaction, Sherlock might almost believe that John was sitting in front of him. Small, warm smile on his face in the amber streetlights. He kept his eyes open.

_And would it have been worth it, after all,_

_To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead—’_

The lines wove aching strands of crimson through his blood until they became a part of him, an intricately woven mobius strip of hurt and longing and painfully tender adoration. At the darkest point of the night, during which Sherlock thought that the sun had perhaps vanished altogether, the strands bound together into a single crystallized mass, weighing down his veins like lead. And then there was the day, too bright and too much and not nearly enough, and he would come quietly undone.

—

Dawn broke into Baker Street in small increments: the sky lightened from pitch to charcoal, briefly passing through a dull, dreary grey before transforming into amber streaked with gold, bright against the dull clouds of the western sky. At seven fourteen, Sherlock saw the light from the corners of his eyes. Refusing to acknowledge it, he stared at the wall in front of him; closed his eyes, steepled the tips of his fingers, focused.

The hinge of the front door squeaked, seventeen steps below.

[“Keep your curtains closed,” Mycroft had warned him on the way back from the tarmac, and Sherlock had only rolled his eyes. “Why?”

“Because, brother mine—” emphasis on the epithet— “windows are a vulnerability. Keep yourself closed off.”

The double meaning was glaringly obvious. “Clearly you are unaware of advancements in weapons technology—alarming in a man who runs the covert affairs of a nation. Curtains will not be a deterrent.”

His brother’s mouth had pinched. “Don’t make it easy on them. That is all that I ask.”

Sherlock had been incandescent with rage and shame, coming down from a rather spectacularly disorienting high. Returning home, he had ripped open the curtains with a savageness tamed only by the shreds of his self-control. He had not shut the curtains since.]

He had not heard the bright sound of metal on metal: a key had not been used to obtain entry. Mycroft was prone to picking the lock but had, in an uncharacteristic show of deference, taken to notifying Sherlock of his entrance via text since his return from the dead. Mrs Hudson had a key. Lestrade would knock.

And oh, god, of course Sherlock had been right all along—curtains were not a deterrent. Nor was glass, nor plaster, nor the comically simple piece of metal that he nonetheless relied on for security, and for a moment 221b seemed insubstantial around him, wavering like an illusion of water in the desert: security in London, gone.

The adrenaline dump threatened to crystallise into terror. He forced it down his throat before moving—muscles tense, breathing quiet—to grab the gun from its resting place on the mantel. The callouses on his bare feet caught of the threads of the rug and he winced, eyes closing involuntarily, remembering just how disastrously his body had betrayed him in Serbia due to its unusual perceptions. _He hadn’t told them anything he wouldn’t this time either maybe they would just kill him straightaway—stop._

Seven seconds since the front door opened. On average, it took Sherlock ten seconds to reach the flat from the foyer; twenty since a bullet to his chest had put him in hospital, in PT. It would take an intruder with aspirations of stealth at least thirty seconds, possibly more, but the creak of the hinge had changed the timing—

Wait.

The hinge.

If they were aiming for stealth, they could have greased the hinge: it was only a matter of applying a bit of oil. They could have opened the door with Sherlock none the wiser. Alternatively, they might have _wanted_ him to know that they were coming—Moriarty had always like to play games with his mind, after all. Or maybe, just maybe—

He could hear the footsteps now: no attempt at stealth, quick, solid, favoring one leg slightly.

_John._

Jerking into action, he placed the gun back on the mantel. A glimpse of his own face greeted him in the mirror as he did so, and he distantly noted the cold sweat along his hairline. His pulse jumped underneath the fragile skin of his throat. No time to fix his appearance; he couldn’t fix the sallowness of his skin or the bruised look of the skin beneath his eyes. At least he was wearing the burgundy dressing gown that John favored—had favored, some time ago now.

The door flew open, a tightly controlled economy of force behind the movement. John walked in, and god, something, _something_ was wrong, it was seven twenty-six in the morning and John hadn’t spoken to him since the tarmac.

John stopped short a careful meter in front of Sherlock. Words appeared to fail him; he clenched his fist as though a carefully rehearsed monologue had been chased out of his head by the violent crack of wood on plaster.

“Did—” John swallowed, his face passing through half a dozen microexpressions that Sherlock couldn’t read, “did you—do anything? Something that, perhaps, you forgot to mention. Something that, in your head, might have seemed inconsequential but it bloody well is _not._ ”

“I don’t understand,” Sherlock said slowly, buying time. It couldn’t be about the drugs, he’d been so careful, so very careful, and anyway it wasn’t as if they _mattered._ Something else, then. He’d have to rely on the one person who always explained everything, even if said person was currently standing in front of him with a clenched jaw and murder written across his face. “John?”

“So,” John said, “you aren’t the reason I woke up this morning to find my wife missing?” He shook his head, disbelieving.

Anger joined with the adrenaline thrilling through his veins: Sherlock laughed, dark and ironic, throwing his head back. The smile he threw at John contained too many teeth. “Your wife left for work early this morning, and somehow I’m to blame? What, did you think she popped over for tea and toast? Excellent _deduction_.”

“You bastard, you—” John cut himself short. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“It was imprecise. How am I to know I’m not the reason? Supposing, of course, that she is actually missing.”

“Let me rephrase,” John said, his polite words belying the anger beneath. “Have you seen her or spoken to her recently? Have there been any plans to _remove_ her from the United Kingdom, perhaps by one government official?”

“I haven’t had anything to do with Mary Morstan since the tarmac. I have not seen her, spoken to her, or spoken about her to anyone; Mycroft has no plans to return her to any of the _many_ countries in which she is a wanted person. Does that answer your question? Quite an interrogation from a man who, by the sound of it, merely woke up alone in his bed.”

“I woke up to find a USB drive on the pillow next to me,” John seethed, looking past Sherlock to the skull on the wall. His hair was slightly flattened on one side, a short tuft sticking up on the other side. “You can guess what was written on the side.”

“A.G.R.A.”

“Right. Same as—well, you know. If,” John emphasized the word, “ _if_ she left voluntarily—why?”

The words that escaped Sherlock’s throat were physically painful to utter, scraped like sandpaper against his trachea. “I don’t know.”

“And you’re certain you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

John looked at him then, hurt and fear obvious in the harsh lines of his face, and rage turned to nausea. “If you do not believe me,” Sherlock stated quietly, masking hurt behind a stiff formality, “there is nothing I can do to change that. I do not see what I have done to earn your distrust on this matter; I have attempted to save your marriage at great personal risk. I trust you remember Magnusson.”

The amber light of the streetlamps gilded the lines of John’s face as he swallowed. Remorse briefly flickered across his face, replaced by a stoic denial that Sherlock knew well. “I know,” John said, arms at his side, standing with steel in his spine despite the weary slump of his eyebrows, “and quite frankly I could care less if she’s done a bunk in the night, she—Sherlock, she _shot_ you, how could you think . . . but she’s pregnant with my child. Due in three weeks, and I . . . I can’t lose her.”

“You’re angry,” Sherlock said. He examined John’s words, rejected them: anger could be the only possible reason that he had said that about Mary; he would regret that later, when they were safe and snug and a happy family, all three of them together—and he had misstepped once more, because John’s eyes glittered in that very particular way that meant _do not push_.

“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock, well spotted. Now, can you,” John gritted his teeth, “please help me find my daughter.”

He’d have to involve Mycroft. Mycroft had demanded to be kept in the loop on all matters relating to Mary, or whatever her real name was—in fact, he undoubtedly had CCTV close at hand of the Watson’s horrid little basement flat on the outskirts of London. (John hated the flat, hated that it was half underground, hated the constant noise of the tenants upstairs—irrelevant, discard.) It would have to be searched, of course, even the brand-new nursery with its frankly horrid yellow walls. John’s life, dismantled into evidence: he would hate it. (Hate Sherlock?)

“Are you even listening to me?” Indignant.

“Yes. Shut up.”

He spun around, suddenly aware that he hadn’t moved since John entered the room, and swiped at his phone with quick, nimble fingers.

_Mary Watson has disappeared, leaving a flash drive behind. SH_

Mycroft replied in under a minute, a sure sign that he had delegated the actual typing to Anthea:

_CCTV will be sent to your email shortly. Men are being dispatched to the Watson residence as we speak._

“You brought the flash drive, of course,” Sherlock rattled off, immersed in his own thoughts. “I have a spare laptop, hasn’t been used before. If there’s malware on the drive it won’t reach anything of importance—”

“Sherlock, you absolute cock,” John said, striding up to him and gripping his upper arm. Sherlock jerked against the hold automatically before stilling. John’s face was very close to his—too close—and he could feel heat emanating from the smaller man’s body. Tilting his square chin up, John spoke in a quiet tone that nonetheless contained deadly force. “Tell me that you’ll help me.”

Sherlock stared down at John, his phone dangling uselessly from his hand. John seemed very far away and too close all at once, and Sherlock took a moment to catalogue the pale downy hair at his temples, the cleft of his chin, the shadows cast by his lashes as he blinked. John’s eyes never left his.

“John,” he said quietly, praying that he could make John understand, “there is nothing in this world I would not do for you.”

John’s breath huffed out in a quiet sigh, the exhale ghosting over Sherlock’s lips. Unconsciously he licked them, and John’s eyes dropped to his lips, tracing the outline of his cupid’s bow. Flushing slightly, Sherlock moved away. His upper arm felt cold; John’s hand twitched by his side restlessly, as though he wanted to grab him again.

“Alright,” John said, a humorless half-laugh falling from his lips; he didn’t move away, and Sherlock wished he was close enough to taste the warmth of his breath again. “Alright.”

—

The CCTV tapes had yet to appear in Sherlock’s inbox and so they began with the USB drive. Sherlock got down to his knees on the rug and pulled an assortment of laptops, all in boxes, out from under the couch; when John looked at him bemusedly he only shrugged. “For a case.”

“I thought you said these hadn’t been used?”

“Technically they have been, but not in connection with any of my accounts. No passwords, no bank account information, no classified or confidential information has ever been present on these computers.” Sherlock selected a black laptop and placed it on the desk. “This one, for instance,” he wrinkled his nose, “was used to communicate with a woman for a case, I researched her and confirmed her story on this computer. Should anyone hack into its history, they’ll only think that I have a predilection toward kink, BDSM specifically.”

“Oh,” John said, pupils slightly dilated, and—oh. John wasn’t put off by the idea, he was rather aroused by it. Filing this newfound knowledge away for a better time, Sherlock continued. “For our purposes, it will be perfectly adequate.”

Having opened the laptop, Sherlock moved to sit down in the chair. Clearing his throat, John raised an eyebrow pointedly.

“Ah. Yes. You might—”

As a show of goodwill, Sherlock pulled the chair out for him. After a brief, suspicious look, John sat. Sherlock hovered at his back.

He had worried that John might be affected by sentiment; might hesitate to open the flash drive and reveal its secrets. Might even refuse completely to open it, preferring a lie to the truth. In the end, John did none of this: he simply removed the case with competent hands, plugged it in, and opened the file, all at the pace of an emergency surgeon, slow and steady. His fingers did not tremble.

A document loaded on the screen, and Sherlock held his breath.

It was blank.

“No,” Sherlock murmured, “that can’t be.” He grabbed the computer and whirled over to his leather armchair, sitting gracelessly. John followed, resting his hands on the back of the chair and peering over Sherlock’s head.

Encryption?—no—white lettering on white page?—no—image encoded into the pixels, too small to see?—no, although that might need further analysis—

John waited as he typed feverishly. Failure was not an _option_ , he couldn’t _do_ that to John.

“Sherlock.”

There had to be another way. Something that he was missing, if he could just _think_ —

“ _S_ _herlock._ ”

Sherlock could have a solution. A seven percent one, in fact, which was a rather bad percentage in terms of accuracy but quite a nice one when it came to cocaine, and then the answer would crystallize in front of him, god so close, he could almost taste it. The peculiar numbness from placing a bit of the powder on his tongue, the clarity that would result from the delicious pinprick of a needle: he wanted it, rather more badly than he cared to admit.

“Sherlock, you berk. Quit it.”

Focusing on the present, Sherlock discovered that he had stopped typing in favor of clenching his fist. Right hand pulling at his hair, the pain soothing, his fingernails digging into the palm of his left hand: he must look mad. He lowered his arm sheepishly and looked up at John.

“When,” John asked, too mildly, “was the last time you ate? Or slept, for that matter.”

“Eating, eating’s boring,” Sherlock muttered.

“It sodding well is _not._ I’m to assume you haven’t slept as well?”

“Does it matter?” Sherlock asked, exasperated. “I’m _working_ now, trying to find your wife and daughter.  Isn’t that what you wanted from me?”

Eyes flashing, John placed himself in Sherlock and looked down. “I never asked you to run yourself into the ground. Not for me.”

Unable to hold his gaze, Sherlock looked down. Their feet were almost touching, a distance so small and yet so vast that a small ache reached up and pulled at the lower left corner of his heart.

Or perhaps that was hunger, after all.

“I’ll order in,” Sherlock conceded. “Will that suffice?”

Nodding slightly, John stepped away. He sat down in his red upholstered chair, running his hands over the armrests in a nervous tic before realization dawned. “Wasn’t my chair—”

“Shh,” Sherlock said. “On the phone.” In his haste to avoid the inevitable question he’d rung the first restaurant that he’d pulled up, which turned out to be Japanese. He ordered enough food to satisfy John and hung up, settling the phone on his armrest and steepling his fingers.

“So,” John said, looking only slightly appeased, “Mycroft has men at my flat right now, doesn’t he.”

“Ah,” said Sherlock, realizing that he ought to have mentioned this. “Um—yes.”

“Brilliant,” he sighed, passing a hand over his face. “My whole life will be rucked apart soon—well, the parts that haven’t already been, anyway.”

Sherlock hated the expression on John’s face: a mixture of resignation and defeat. He preferred John yelling to this quieter, sadder version of his friend, and wondered if he should provoke a row. _No, not good,_ he told himself. Distraction, then.

“The drive appears to be intentionally blank,” he said, focusing on the kitchen over John’s shoulder. He felt John’s attention snap to him, diverted from his frustration. “Of course Mycroft and his people will make certain, but assuming that it is—why? It might not be a message in the traditional sense of,” he waved a hand, “words and such, but it clearly is a message. What it means depends on who sent it—”

Sherlock cut himself off and hesitated, but John raised his eyebrows in the sort of way that meant _get on with it._ “You’re a former soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. You would _notice_ if a stranger entered your bedroom. There’s really only one person to whom you are so attuned that you no longer wake when they enter and leave.”

“Mary,” John said, his voice heavy.

“You don’t display signs of having been drugged,” Sherlock said. He turned his head to the side; noticed that the door was still wide open. He felt exposed. “Mary is the only person who could have placed the USB drive next to you without waking you. She would not do so under threat.”

John absorbed this stoically, with a quick jerk of his head. Gaze focused steadily on the rug in front of him, he fidgeted with his wedding ring; Sherlock wondered if he knew he was doing it.

God, how Sherlock wished he could know what John was thinking just then. His face, normally so expressive, was set as though in stone. Sherlock used the momentary lull to move into the kitchen, bare feet rustling gently over the cool floor.

He had just put the kettle on and was reaching for John’s RAMC mug when the phone in his pocket vibrated. Willing his fingers to stop trembling, he answered curtly.

“Have you got the tapes?”

The older man sighed—not the one he used when felt that Sherock was being unnecessarily rude, but the one that indicated that he was unduly irritated with the world and its inhabitants. Sherlock loved it, that sigh, because it meant that Mycroft needed his help, which was always delicious. “CCTV tapes are wiped clean. Intentionally hacked, obviously, by someone with a great deal of skill.”

“So find tapes along the most likely routes,” Sherlock said, annoyed. He reached for the bags of pu’erh, John’s favorite.

“When I said that the tapes were wiped clean,” Mycroft began again, decorous tone hardly disguising his frustration, “I meant for the entirety of London.”

“Oh.”

“Indeed.”

“This is . . .” Sherlock trailed off, looking at John in the sitting room, still doing an impressive job of mimicking catatonia, “bigger than I had expected.”

“Sherlock, I’ve got my people on this. I want you and John _out of the way_ , do you understand me?” Mycroft demanded, his voice no less impressive through the slight static of the connection.

Sherlock nearly scalded himself as he poured boiling water into the mugs. Water sluiced over the rim of his mug, darkening the wood of the table. “Stay out of it?” he demanded, outraged. “We’re already _in it_ , she has his daughter.”

“Yes,” Mycroft replied, “and therefore she has John. So she has you. Do not let yourself become a pawn in this game, Sherlock. The consequences are greater than you can imagine.”

“They already are,” Sherlock said, and hung up.

He braced his hands on the table for a moment, staring down at the two mugs, before carefully adding two lumps of sugar to both and carrying them out into the sitting room.

“Tea,” he announced redundantly as he forced the mug into John’s hands. Blinking, John looked up at him, startled out of his head. “Um. Thanks.”

Sherlock shrugged insouciantly, slurping at his own tea.

“So, what went wrong.”

He thought about avoiding the question; trying to distract him; he remembered the deadly stillness of John’s _you didn’t answer my question_ earlier and decided against it, purely for reasons of self-preservation. “CCTV is out.”

“I’ll be the Sherlock to your Mycroft, then: can’t you check the cameras along the most likely routes?”

He’d heard Sherlock’s side of the conversation—interesting. Not nearly so far into shock as he’d supposed, then. Sherlock wondered if he should regret making him tea and revealing that he did after all know how to put the kettle on. “CCTV’s out through all of London.”

“That . . . shouldn’t be possible.”

“Shouldn’t be, no.”

“And yet.”

Sherlock cleared his throat. “The magnitude is perhaps—larger than I had anticipated.”

“So you do suppose that there’s a connection between Mary and the video?” John’s tone was bland, conversational; his body language anything but. His toes flexed, the movement just visible beneath the heavy leather of his oxfords, and he held his left shoulder stiffly.

“Can’t speculate without all the data, obviously.”

“ _Sherlock_.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I hadn’t even considered it until you came in here this morning.”

“And you consider everything,” John said with a hint of hope.

Sherlock shook his head. “It’s been made quite obvious that Mary is a blind spot for me. I can’t—I don’t know.”

“Mary? Why?”

_No reason. She’s an ex-assassin, John, she’s skilled at concealment, not to mention marksmanship. I wanted you to be happy. I—_

Sherlock cut off this line of thought with ruthless precision; severed it with a scalpel and discarded the maudlin sentiment, only to find himself facing John without an answer.

The doorbell rang, two sharp pulses. Sherlock had never been so glad to hear that horribly grating chime, not even in his greatest agonies of boredom.

“That would be the food,” he called over his shoulder as he rushed down the stairs, dressing gown billowing behind him. He can hear John mutter something vaguely behind him.

The delivery boy looked confused as he hands over three white plastic bags of takeout, and Sherlock couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. He pressed more money than strictly necessary into his hands and shut the door.

“John,” he said, finally shutting the door to the flat, “is there any reason that the delivery boy would look at me oddly?”

John’s eyes were still dark with anxiety and anger, but at this he appeared to hide a hint of an unwilling smile behind the back of his hand. “Well,” he said matter-of-factly, with the air of a man picking from a veritable bouquet of dysfunctions, “there’s the fact that you’re wearing an inside out vest with—god, are those holes on the hem?—with a three hundred quid silk robe, for one thing, or that one of your curls is somehow sticking straight up, or that you were still holding a mug that says _not to be used in experiments_ written in biro on the side of it—for which I refuse to apologize, by the way, we both got so very ill that one time—but none of those are particularly new and I’m absolutely certain that all of the restaurants in central London know about you and warn their delivery people not to linger; and so I’m going to guess that it’s because you ordered a buffet’s worth of teriyaki at eight in the morning.”

Sherlock blinked. “It is morning, isn’t it.”

“Mhmm.”

“Well,” he said, “I got sushi too.”

“That _definitely_ makes it breakfast-appropriate.”

Sherlock looked up from untying the first bag and caught John’s eye. For a moment they walked on the knife’s edge of hysteria, until John bit his lower lip and looked down at the rug once more, shaking his head.

“My wife is a criminal, my daughter is missing and I’m eating teriyaki with my old flatmate at eight a.m. on a Tuesday. Christ, this is a mess.” John sighed.

Good humor evaporating, Sherlock could only blame the bitterness welling up in his chest for what he said next: “To be fair, you already knew she was a criminal.”

“Fuck off, Sherlock.”

They sat in silence, the flimsy bags puddled around the white styrofoam boxes in front of them. After a moment, Sherlock pulled out a container of miso soup and placed in front of John carefully, a peace offering in a styrofoam tub.

He didn’t say anything. But he accepted the spoon that Sherlock held out to him, and he counted it as a small victory.

Once the scent of broiled beef and savory-sweet teriyaki reached his nose, Sherlock knew himself to be famished. He plucked the small gyoza container from the bag to John’s left, coming dangerously close to upsetting John’s spoonful of miso.

They ate in silence: Sherlock contemplative and John sullen. There was a look on his face that Sherlock didn’t recognize, pressed into the lines around his dark eyes and the corners of his mouth—not the right side of it, the one that John smiled with, but the left one that seemed to drag just deeper than usual.

Reaching for the container of teriyaki, Sherlock asked abruptly, “Why didn’t I hear you on the way in?”

“I, um,” John said, a bit sheepishly, “might’ve picked the locks. A bit.”

“A bit.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you learn. . .” Sherlock let the sentence trail off, a suspicion pulling together in his mind.

John confirmed it. “Mary taught me, actually. I was complaining one day about how you got to do all of the useful things like picking locks and chasing down criminals, and so. She taught me. Not that difficult, really; I got the hang of it soon enough.” He cleared his throat nervously.

Suddenly aware of the pulse pounding at his carotid, Sherlock’s chest swelled with—rage? jealousy? both, he thought, unwilling to pause over semantics. _How could he, how could he think that he wasn’t useful, that he didn’t_ matter _like nothing else has or ever will._ And god, of course—John was good at it; he would be, wouldn’t he, with his neat competent surgeon’s hands and his quiet confidence. Sherlock played back in his mind his last sighting of the lock, when he had paid for the takeout; there was a single thin scratch from where Mycroft had misapplied his pick and nothing else. No signs of tampering, no slight rasp of the lock as he had bolted the door—John was _good_ , and Sherlock would want him to pick every lock from now on, even the unnecessary ones, just to prove to John that Sherlock _relied_ on him and _trusted_ him and _wanted_ him, except Mary had spoiled it. The slight blush of pride on his face, mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension, belonged to Mary; if Sherlock so much as saw him lift a _key_ again he knew he would be swamped with another claret wave of rage and despair.

And all through this Sherlock sat quietly, spinal cord reinforced with steel, as he dipped another potsticker into the soy sauce, carefully avoiding the sesame seeds that littered the top of the liquid.

John ate careful bites of beef teriyaki, facing straight ahead but clearly waiting for a response.

“Well done,” Sherlock said quietly. The praise surprised John, who turned his head slightly too quickly, assessing if the detective was genuine. Sherlock stared straight ahead. “I didn’t even hear you until the door opened.”

Claret evaporated into grey; resentment gave way to melancholy. The tang of the soy sauce rested heavily on his tongue, simultaneously cloying and bitter. He took a sip of lukewarm tea and grimaced slightly.

Sherlock broke the tense silence a few moments later. “You won’t be able to go back to your flat.”

John didn’t so much as blink, the thought having clearly occurred to him. “I can always find a hotel,” he said around a bite of food.

“You could stay here.”

“I wouldn’t,” John paused, searching for the right words, “want to impose.”

“Nonsense,” Sherlock disagreed, perhaps too quickly; and so to cover up his eagerness he sped on: “It’s logical, you see; you have closer access to me and therefore to Mycroft when you’re here, as well as extensive security; some of your clothing is still upstairs and so you wouldn’t have to buy new. Your bed is still made up, even, as always.”

John turned toward him, tilting his head. Something soft fluttered around the edges of his eyes. “You’ve got my bed made up? Haven’t turned the room into a second morgue?”

“Of course not,” Sherlock said. “It’s yours.”

The softness on John’s face grew clearer before it all collapsed in on him, dragging his worn features into an odd expression that he couldn’t place.

“Well then,” John said in a voice just above a whisper, “I’ll stay here.”

Sherlock didn’t trust himself to speak for a moment. _White-gold-sunlight_ fireworks felt as though they were sparking in his chest—the heady triumph tempered by the constant, unassailable knowledge that this was no longer John’s home, as much as he wanted to pretend otherwise.

But maybe, just maybe—a hope too tremulous to put into words—John would want to stay—?

He had let John go, time and time again, on a rooftop and in a restaurant and during a wedding and in a penthouse and in an empty house with trains rumbling the foundation beneath his feet, and John—John was coming back, if only for a while.

Maybe this time Sherlock would be able to keep him.

“Good,” he said, quirking the corner of his mouth at John in a way that John would know to be genuinely pleased.

_I love you,_ Sherlock thought desperately, hopelessly. _I love you._


	2. Chapter 2

They neither of them knew what to do with themselves for the rest of the day. John created plans in his mind, discarding them when they wandered into the realm of Bond films—he could tell by the tension that would build in John’s shoulders before a sigh blew it all away, deepening the frown on his face.

Sherlock analyzed, deduced; came up blank. Unable to keep still, he flitted between three laptops, texted his homeless network, waited for further communication: no new information arose. John glared at him when his movements took a turn for the frantic, and so he tried to temper his impatience quietly.

There was nothing to do. No information, the entirety of London—optimistic, she could be much farther away; the world, then—as their hunting ground, their query a woman with a clandestine past and a presumed connection to Moriarty: he breathed through spiraling panic as he tried to _think._

The homeless network was of no use: she would have certainly used a disguise. CCTV was out. He scrolled through the Met’s bulletin of crimes and found nothing that could be even remotely connected to Mary Morstan.

But, he remembered with a flash of adrenaline, Mary was just as skilled as he when it came to digital espionage and likely more so; she might have erased any traces of her illegal activities from the scanner. Or, even more likely, any crimes she had committed hadn’t been discovered yet—

“Stop that,” John said sharply. He came back to himself with a start and realized that his fingers were tapping a quick beat on the hard wood of the desk, tempo _allegro moderato_. Stilling his hands, he checked the time and was startled to find it late evening. A glance at the window confirmed it: the streetlights cast amber into the flat once more.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. John just shook his head. Over the hours of the day he had grown harder, stiller; his countenance that of a masterful sculpture: marble-hard but tensed for the slightest provocation. He knew without asking that John was a tightly wound coil of anger and something else, something that Sherlock couldn’t identify. It looked out of place on his proud face.

“So,” John started, inhaling deeply as though preparing to march into the deserts of Helmand, med kit in hand and gun slung over his shoulder, “I’m to do nothing. Not one bloody thing to find my daughter.”

“For the time being.”

“And that’s. . . just fine with you.”

“God no,” Sherlock said, frustrated. “It’s what there _is._ I’ve been thinking, all day, and I can’t think of a single lead. There are too many pregnant women in London for us to find one in particular, especially without CCTV and facial recognition software, and she knows to avoid areas in which the homeless network would notice her. Our search extends across _the entirety of the globe_ at the moment. And if she is—”

He trailed off, and John finished his thought. “If she is in league with Moriarty, we’ll know soon enough.”

“It’s a strong possibility.”

John huffed out a mirthless laugh. “So I can look forward to my child being used as, as bait. So that Moriarty can get to you.”

The thought makes Sherlock want to curl in on himself until he disappeared entirely. How could he not have realized this? He curled his fingernails into his palm, bright crescents on the flesh of his palm, and attempted to sound steady. “It works on a system of leverage. If they have the baby they have you and therefore they have me.”

“We’re a package deal, then. Two for one,” John said, eyes tightly closed. He opened them and pulled his shoulders back into parade rest. “Is there any way to break the—chain, isn’t it, the chain of leverage?”

He held himself immobile so as not to flinch. “If I,” he said, voice just slightly ragged around the edges, “if I could stop myself from caring about you, I would have long ago.”

John nodded, jaw tense. “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that you don’t actually want me.” He stood up and exited the room. Sherlock could hear the cadence of his footsteps going up the stairs to his old room.

 _Idiot,_ Sherlock thought fiercely, uncertain of whether he was directing the insult at himself or John. _Idiot idiot idiot idiot. He thought you meant that you didn’t want him._

John has been wrong before, off by several orders of magnitude on issues of crime (Sherlock couldn’t remember the incident with Connie Prince’s cat with swallowing a snort), but this was—bigger than orders of magnitude off. Universes off. Eons off.

 _What I meant, what I meant is that I love you. And I can’t say it or express it and you’d never in a million years believe me if I did. I’m a machine, I don’t feel things that way, I don’t_ care _about people: all of this you’ve said, and now it feels like a living autopsy every moment that I hurt you, and yet I can’t seem to stop. I never wanted this to happen, but it did and I love you desperately, and the one thing you want from me—my indifference—is something that I can never give you (although I can pretend it well enough, only to you, only for you)._

 _I’d let you go if I could,_ he thought bleakly, _but it wouldn’t change this. And I’m selfish enough to want every moment with you that I can possibly have._

It ached, this knowledge; despair spread out from his knuckles and pooled in the thin layer of skin beneath his fingernails. He knew of only one solution.

He turned the lights off quietly, because John had always nagged him about it back when they lived together, and padded softly into the bedroom.

Sherlock didn’t bother hiding the vial. The small crystal bottle was tucked neatly into his sock index along with fresh hypodermics and alcohol swabs, just adjacent to the clear plastic bag of white powder. That he tucked inside the folds of his only tie; the tired plastic of the bag looked out of place among the cashmere socks and silk-blend pants, folded neatly and color-coded. Depravity hidden within order: the juxtaposition made him smile ironically as he slid the drawer open.

Sherlock didn’t used to bother keeping tabs on his morality. The interplay of “good” and “bad” was imprecise and determined largely by a society whose determination to be “good” was belied by the glaring imperfections that Sherlock gleaned just from looking them: _adulterer gambler addict petty thief liar abuser._ If he believed in the nonsense that the masses spouted as gospel, he’d go mad. He had thrown it all away in favor of amorality and adopted competence as a measuring stick until an army doctor had limped into his life and demanded that he differentiate between _good_ and _not good._ Sherlock had agreed only because the distinction was so gorgeous on John. He’d known that John was a good doctor, obviously, and a crack shot; he hadn’t realized the contradiction of a doctor who fought in war and shot to kill for a man he’d only just met, and John wore it so well that he’d always thought it simple. A paradox, John was, and Sherlock hadn’t even _realized_. He wanted to turn John inside out and examine him, trace his veins and learn all of the hidden complexities of his being, and he was dimly aware that he could only do that if he understood the full spectrum of humanity. So Sherlock listened, and learned, and despite the tedious nature of his task was persistently fascinated by John’s depth and complexity.

He fell off a roof and into a scheme to take down an international crime syndicate. Morality would only slow him down; he placed it in his mind palace in a classroom at an uncannily mirrored continuing education college and proceeded to carry out his objective.

For John’s sake, he had committed himself to being good once he came back from the dead. He gave him away, thrice and a million times over; focused his considerable mental capacities on ensuring John’s happiness; saved lives instead of solving murders.  He’d found himself with a hot gun in his hand and, a week later, a pocket with enough drugs to down an elephant anyway. And now, _now,_ John’s child was in danger for no other reason than his ludicrous fondness for John. _Sod it all_ , Sherlock thought, exhausted.

It wasn’t good, the eleven—no, hm, thirteen ml of morphine that he drew up into his syringe. But the drugs made him _work_ , pushed him beyond the realms of human genius and god, he’d never needed the help more. It was in service of a good thing, and—didn’t that count for something?

The bite of the steel needle was white-hot bliss in the crook of his elbow, and for a moment he thought that alone might be enough. But it wasn’t—it never was—and so he depressed the syringe slowly.

The morphine wrote calligraphy through his veins, dark and warm and lazy. He felt comfortably numb as he curled up in his sheets, pressing two fingers against the needle mark as though marking the beat of his pulse. John’s footsteps could be heard through the ceiling. Sherlock could tell that he favored his left leg by the slightly uneven vibrations as he moved around the room.

 _And anyway,_ he thought blurrily as he drifted into the welcoming darkness, returning to his earlier musings as he listened to the rustle of tightly made sheets in the room above, _he wouldn’t care if he knew._

—

He blinked himself awake at six the next morning, the weak sunlight piercing as he sat up. Ought to shut the curtains, but then Mycroft would win, wouldn’t he, and that thought was even more unpleasant than the light attempting to carve fractal patterns into the base of his skull. And he’d slept a solid nine hours; any more and his transport would refuse to function at optimum levels.

Somewhat muddled from his recreations of the previous night, Sherlock dressed at a leisurely pace. He selected a button down the colour of a stormcloud and his favorite trousers, and for a touch of whimsy pulled on his favorite burgundy socks. His eyes felt dry—an unfortunate side effect of the morphine, in all likelihood—and so he decided to forgo contacts and wear glasses.

Just as he finished putting product in his hair, the door to the bathroom opened and John stumbled in.

“Jesus,” John exclaimed, clearly startled and a bit wary.

“Oh,” Sherlock said reflexively, and then bit his lip: involuntary exclamations were undignified, he chided himself.

Then again, so was having your flatmate ( _temporary flatmate_ , he reminded himself once more, _temporary_ ) interrupt you in the loo. At least John hadn’t walked in three minutes prior.

“Um,” he said, wincing slightly, “Sorry. Old habits. I was just finishing anyway.”

He slid past John, just barely inhaling the sleepy-warm scent of him as he passed, and strode into the kitchen with far more determination than he actually felt.

Having successfully demonstrated his tea-making skills the previous day, Sherlock decided to put the kettle on again. Two days in a row: John would be pleased.

John was not in a pleasant mood, as it turned out. He walked into the kitchen, carefully placing weight on each leg equally, and sat down on the chair heavily. Sherlock took in the tight lines around his eyes, the wrinkles engraved in his forehead, the tight line of his shoulders—he had had nightmares the previous night, obviously. Sherlock wondered what he dreamed about. Was it Afghanistan, hot sun beating down relentlessly and the hot tear of a bullet through muscle? The pool and the weight of a Semtex vest? The pavement beneath Bart’s?

His daughter, almost certainly, Sherlock decided.

“How was your room?” Sherlock asked.

“Same as it always was,” John answered grumpily. “But I think I’m missing a jumper or two that I thought I’d left here—Sherlock, did you by any chance use my clothing for experiments, _again_?”

“Of course not,” Sherlock said, slightly offended. It was true, after all, and it wasn’t as if John had asked if Sherlock had _taken_ his jumpers. He thought of John’s oatmeal cable-knit, stuffed under his pillow like a secret. John’s presumption annoyed him, though, and he found himself adding, “Although it wasn’t as if I thought you’d come back for them.”

John clenched his jaw. “Right.”

His irritation was infectious; Sherlock found himself scowling down at the table. His headache didn’t help matters.

“Mycroft should be by today,” Sherlock said in a monotone, staring out the window at the grey morning; he saw John’s head snap up out of the corner of his eyes. “If there’s any new information, he’ll let us know.”

John acknowledged this with a curt nod. “That’s—good. I suppose.”

The kettle whistled, a silver-bright noise in the dim kitchen; Sherlock got up quickly to turn it off. The noise wrapped itself in knots of flat ribbon between his ears even as he poured water into their respective mugs.

John didn’t appear to notice the mug in front of him, even as the steam curled off the top of the liquid and skimmed the tip of his nose. Sherlock studied him again. The burden of worry was sapping him of his strength: John appeared more brittle by the hour. Perhaps reassurance would help.

“We will find her, John. I swear to you.”

John finally looked up. “I thought you didn’t make vows.”

“Only for you,” he said without thinking. Instantly he regretted it. How could he manage to be so maudlinly sentimental at the worst possible moment? John was married, albeit to a missing and likely criminal ex-assassin; his daughter missing with her. This was _not good_ of epic proportions, and he could only pray that John was still caught up in his thoughts and didn’t catch the near-Freudian slip.

_Do you, William Sherlock Scott Holmes—_

He cut himself off and drank his tea angrily; it scalded his tongue. Heat rose high on his cheekbones, entirely unrelated to the steaming liquid.

But of course John had picked that moment to pay attention. Blue eyes scrutinized him for a moment, and Sherlock fought down rising anxiety and tremulous hope that rose internally in a cacophonous crescendo. Had John finally heard him?

John’s face softened slightly, but all he said was “You didn’t used to wear glasses.”

“Yes, well,” Sherlock murmured petulantly, bitterness rising on the tip of his blistered tongue as the aching cavern where his heart once resided throbbed and burbled blood in three quarter time, “things have changed.”

—

At nine o’clock precisely Mycroft entered the room, and Sherlock smirked at him.

“Six minutes waiting in your chauffeured town car just so you can make a perfectly timed entrance? I’m quite glad I made you take Mummy and Daddy to the theatre given your penchant for needless _dramatics_.”

His older brother gave a well-practiced weary sigh before sitting in Sherlock’s chair, refusing to respond to the taunt. “Good morning,” he said, facing John and inclining his head slightly. “My apologies, John.”

“For?” John asked, the question a challenge.

“I’m sorry?” Mycroft said, an expression of faintly surprised distaste upon his face.

“Are you sorry that my wife is an ex-assassin? Or that she’s missing, or that my daughter is missing, or that my home has been turned upside down presumably on your orders—you could mean any number of things,” John said pleasantly. “But you Holmeses process information so quickly that all of those things must seem as though they happened last year. Which makes me wonder,” he sat down in his chair across from Mycroft and leaned forward, “if there is something _new_ that you plan to apologize for.”

A moue of distaste crossed Mycroft’s face; he looked as though he had been caught out. Sherlock watched as he lounged against the desk, stifling a smile that nonetheless appeared in the twist at the corner of his mouth. How he loved when John deliberately antagonised Mycroft—today in particular every word, no matter how politely John uttered it, sounded as though he was saying _fuck you_ , and Sherlock was quite content to watch Mycroft squirm under the unexpected hostility.

“You understand, of course, the danger of a rogue ex-intelligence agent going missing,” Mycroft began decorously. “Particularly one with Mary’s particular skill set. Her pregnancy makes her no less of a threat, as Sherlock can undoubtedly recount for you at his leisure.”

John’s face turned to stone, but somehow the promise of imminent death was communicated to both brothers clearly. Sherlock quite abruptly stopped enjoying the conversation. Delicious as it was to watch Mycroft’s irritation, he was reminded that John’s frustration, which appeared to be growing exponentially with every moment that Mycroft sat in the flat and waved his umbrella as a fussy public school teacher would his pointer, could easily turn on him.

“This is the part where you tell me that the Americans are now searching for Mary as well, isn’t it.”

His lips thinned. “We had an agreement, unspoken though it may have been: she would refrain from criminal activity and I would. . . let her be. She violated the terms.”

“And you’re so certain that she left voluntarily?” John challenged.

“We found a safe hidden behind a—terribly banal, I might add—abstract art painting in the sitting room. Analysis revealed traces of gunpowder, explosives, and evidence of a rather deadly airborne poison; the safe itself was empty. The lock was not tampered with. Tell me, John, were these your belongings?”

He blinked, clenched his left hand in a fist. “No.”

“You need not worry about the Americans,” Mycroft said, something indefinable creeping into his tone, and Sherlock sat forward. “I made inquiries—discreet, of course—to no avail. Despite my considerable influence, I received no results, and let me assure you that my influence is rather crucial to a large subset of the world.”

Sherlock’s mind raced, arriving at only one conclusion: “Mary wasn’t CIA.”

“No,” Mycroft confirmed.

“But why. . .” John said softly.

“Her story was nearly unforgivable,” Sherlock said heavily, pieces falling together. “Very nearly: a perfect calculation. You are a doctor and hesitate to harm, and yet as a soldier you killed. You would understand the moral complexities of murder as ordered by the state better than anyone else; but due to your duality you wouldn’t press. You would forgive her without examining the details—oh, that’s quite neatly done. Brilliant, in fact.”

“That,” John growled after a moment of furious silence, “is not sodding _brilliant_.” His face flushed as the vein on his forehead pulsed.

In an uncharacteristic show of deference, both Sherlock and Mycroft remained silent. John’s anger was lovely thing to behold, in Sherlock’s opinion, as dangerous as a tsunami and all the more lethal for its seeming benignity, but just because he was capable of appreciating deadly forces of nature did not mean he wanted to stand in their path. He averted his eyes. The room around him seemed the same as it always had—cluttered with his own detriment, lab equipment and specimens and books, and just occasionally he could pick out John’s old things sitting on a mantel or shoved within a bookcase: his mug rested on the coffee table; old medical journals propped up a bust on a shelf. It seemed wrong that the room itself was so very normal when nothing inside of it was.

While Sherlock had been examining the room, John had calmed somewhat; his need for answers outweighed his righteous indignation. “You don’t know who she is, then.”

“At the moment we are unaware as to her true identity.”

“Do we know _anything_ ,” John asked, “about her past?”

“I assume that it was far more illicit than she had indicated. Her skill set matched that of an intelligence agent; for her to have acquired those skills outside of traditional channels is. . . troubling.”

“Not that slow, figured that one out, yeah.” John took a deep breath. “Now, onto the sixty four thousand dollar question, or the million dollar one, or however absurdly high the sums get in your clandestine world: is she affiliated with Moriarty?”

Mycroft sighed and laid his umbrella beside him on the floor, and Sherlock took note: it was the closest he had seen his brother come to admitting defeat. “All of our evidence is circumstantial, you understand,” Mycroft said, apologizing without actually saying the words. “That her entrance coincided with Sherlock’s death is suspicious; that her flight took place less than a week after Moriarty’s broadcast. . .” He let the sentence trail off.

“Moriarty is dead,” Sherlock insisted. “I saw him blow his own brains out; even he couldn’t have survived that.”

“What if he didn’t need to?”

A thousand threads weaved through his mind, _he’s a spider—you’re only a man—when did we start saying “he” to refer to Moriarty—?_ until Sherlock realized: “Moriarty isn’t a person.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Well, he is of course, you and I saw him,” Sherlock rambled, brain racing, “but Moriarty—what if he isn’t what we thought? What if he wasn’t the mastermind after all?”

Oh, god. He closed his eyes against a nauseating wave of terror as the implications hit him. He had dismantled Moriarty’s network secure in the assumption that, with their leader gone, they would be scattered and easily dealt with; when that had been less true than he had guessed he had simply ignored it, intent upon survival. What if it had all been for nothing?

“My working theory,” Mycroft said, confirming his fears, “is that Mary Morstan is actually an operative who we have known only as Moran. Moriarty’s second in command.”

John turned to look at Sherlock, chin raised. “I thought that you had dismantled the network when you were off playing Bond.”

Sherlock was impassive; internally he flinched and winced back from invisible hands. “I was—called back early,” he said in a monotone.

John quirked an eyebrow at that, seemingly disbelieving. “So,” he said abruptly, “quite honestly I don’t particularly care what happens to Mary, but she has my _child_. How do you propose we get her back?”

It was Mycroft’s turn to wince subtly. “We can assume that she has not delivered the child yet. She will not harm her; doing so would invalidate her leverage. Your child is safe, John. But. . . there is little we can do at the moment.”

Ever a soldier, John bore the news stoically: his chin jerked ominously, but his posture remained upright and his expression did not waver. Surely he was remembering his residency at Bart’s, the endless tactical forays in the hot desert of Helmand Province, the terrifyingly ill-equipped surgeries in buildings clipped by mortars and the endless stakeouts; all times in which waiting had been the only possible course of action.

“You will tell me the moment there is any, and I mean any, news.”

Mycroft inclined his head. “Understood.”

John stood up from the chair stiffly. Rage demanded that he act recklessly, fear that he move slowly; the two canceled each other out and so he rose like a fighter, self-contained. The terror and anger overlapped slightly, however; evident only in the erratic movements of his fingers and the tight cast of his face.

Meeting his brother’s eyes as John left the room without a backward glance, Mycroft said nothing. His gaze slid clinically and impassionately over Sherlock, lingering on the crook of his left elbow. The slight tilt of his head left no doubt that Mycroft had deduced his activities of the night before.

Denial rose on Sherlock’s tongue before he swallowed it. What good would it do? Mycroft knew. Furthermore, they both knew that it was useless: Sherlock was in the middle of attempting the most important case of his life against an enemy who had bested him at the top of his game; involuntary withdrawal would be to forfeit before the first pawn had been moved.

“Brother mine,” Mycroft said quietly as he bent to pick up his precious brolly, wiping the handle with a handkerchief, and Sherlock tensed in preparation of a lecture, “be careful.”

It was all he said, and with a miniscule nod toward the direction in which John had vanished and a ghost of a smile directed at Sherlock, he left, shutting the door gently behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

Just as Sherlock had known, John Watson was practiced at waiting. What he could not do was wait patiently.

Over the course of the next week, John’s temper was on a hair trigger. The clutter of the flat, something that Sherlock had never once known to bother John, led to a clenched jaw and restrained tone whenever the subject arose; his experiments, while properly labeled and stored properly in the refrigerator, were promptly binned, which Sherlock found excruciatingly unfair; and John saw fit to criticize the new layout of the kitchen at every opportunity.

“Why the _hell_ is the sugar in the corner cabinet, Sherlock.”

Sherlock didn’t bother looking up from his laptop in the next room. “I’ve no idea. Janine redid it, I told you.”

He fancied he could hear John’s molars grinding together a room away. Fascinating. He wondered if it was possible to measure such a thing—perhaps with a sensitive enough tool he detect the noise and measure it against the average hearing levels of a human. An interesting experiment, one that he would surely get a chance to test if so inclined: John expressed his frustration often enough.

“Well,” John said in a carefully measured tone, “it’s utter shit.”

Why did John _care_ so much about such a tiny thing? It didn’t _matter._ Janine had rearranged the kitchen; John had rearranged the sinew and tissues of his chest, twined himself in between aching heartstrings and and tucked himself in neatly.

He could hear the familiar sounds of water settling into the bottom of the kettle, a slightly metallic tang to the note. Soon the lovely cacophony of mugs and sugar spoons would begin, and John’s irritation (hopefully) soothed with it. Tea generally had a calming effect on him, after all.

He had to give John this: John did not complain about his circumstances. He made no move to rush off headlong into danger, and he did not relentlessly demand to know what more could be done. John understood as well as Sherlock that there was nothing to be done with the limited information to which they had access, and he bore this patiently. John had to channel his frustration into other means, Sherlock reminded himself constantly, and he himself was the best outlet.

John set his mug down on the table with a subtle thud, and Sherlock opened his eyes from his repose on the sofa. “Where’s mine?”

“You,” John said, “you can get up and make your own tea. Presumptuous, aren't we?”

But then again, just because he knew himself to be John’s ideal punching bag at the moment didn’t mean that he _enjoyed_ the exercise. Hurt flooded through him, mingled with an undercurrent of shame. Presumptuous of him to assume that John would make him tea, perhaps, but—John hadn’t _not_ before, and the lack of it shook the air from his lungs more sharply than the occasion called for.

Presumptuous of him to assume that John still cared for him, even in the most simple of ways.

He swept off the sofa in a swirl of dark blue silk and strode toward his bedroom. John would only think he was sulking; let him.

“And for Christ’s sake, take a shower and put on fresh clothing. It’s been three days,” John called after him.

Sherlock turned around, snarling. “ _Fine_ ,” he snapped, and left the room.

—

“Get up, we’re going out.”

John looked up from his chair, ensconced in a crossword puzzle. “Sorry, what?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, I loathe doing so,” Sherlock said. “We’re getting out of the flat. Go change into something casual.”

John only pursed his lips. “And if I don’t want to?”

“By all means, stay here,” Sherlock said indifferently, “but I thought you’d like the chance to get out a bit.”

“Does this have anything to do with—with anything?” John demanded, unwilling to articulate .

“No,” he responded, refusing to allow any emotion into his voice.

“Why, then.”

“Fine, stay here,” Sherlock said, flopping down into his chair and shrugging as though he didn’t much care one way or the other. There was a brief moment of silence as John fought his curiosity, but as Sherlock had predicted, the struggle didn’t last long.

“Something casual, you said?” John asked, and Sherlock knew he had won. He looked Sherlock up and down, noting the worn jeans and ragged tee. “That’s—new.”

“Old, actually,” Sherlock corrected carelessly. “We’ll leave in five minutes.”

John grumbled as he stood, but there was the barest hint of gratitude in his tone. The crossword puzzle must have been terribly dull, Sherlock thought, having never been able to stomach the things himself. Adrenaline, adventure. That’s what he needed.

Sherlock intended to see that John got it.

The black cab deposited them, as per Sherlock’s instructions, in southern London. The street on which they walked was small but lively: the bars, announcing themselves in flickering neon lights, were overflowing onto the pavement. The clapboard on all of the buildings was faded and graffitied, the paint on the doorways was cracked and peeling: this was the part of town that some would describe as seedy. Raucous laughter, fueled by cheap beer and too many well drinks, rose above them and they strode down to a particular bar that Sherlock knew.

There was no sign on the front other than a neon pink Heineken advert on its last dregs, the light so dim as to barely be visible even in the darkness of night, but it wasn’t the sort of place one wandered into searching for a cheap drink and a laugh. The bar was half-full as Sherlock pushed open the door. He could feel John’s resentful puzzlement as he took in the grimy pub with its too-loud music pulsing in waves: _seriously?_

Sherlock ignored this and took a seat at the bar. “I’ll have a Red Rooster,” he ordered, and felt rather than heard John’s derisive snort behind him.

“Ah, you want to ask for a Bloody Tom. ‘S in the back,” the barkeep replied easily, leaning over the bar. “Second door to the left.”

“Ta,” Sherlock said, sliding off the stool and striding toward the back corridor the man had indicated. John caught up with him halfway, grabbing his forearm and yanking him back.

“What the hell is this?” he hissed, his grip tight.

Not working, evidently. He breathed in, out, willed himself to look as non-confrontational as possible, and replied, “It’s a surprise.”

“No shit.”

“Just _look_ , it’s not _dangerous_ ,” Sherlock said, frustrated almost to the point of tears. He was grateful that they were nearly in the back hallway; the fewer people to witness their row the better. “Please.”

John stared at him steadily, not looking away, not letting go. The tight pressure of John’s fingers was almost soothing but for the intent behind it. He was aware suddenly that they were too close once more, that if he just leaned forward he would be able to inhale the warm salty scent of John.

John let go of him suddenly, stepping back. “Fine.” Sherlock nodded curtly, and they went through the door.

The door led them outside into an alley that was in an even more deplorable state than the pub. Jagged shards of glass from empty bottles littered the asphalt and the bins overflowed with trash half-falling out the bags to reveal the aluminium of beer cans. Even in the chilly air of a February night, the bins reeked: a peculiar combination of bile, rotgut, sawdust, and a hint of something metallic.

Two men loitered just outside the entrance to the adjacent building. Burly, working class, fond of enjoying the perks of working for a business whose front was a bar. Sherlock could detect their drinks of choice from three meters.

They watched him with disinterest as he approached. “I’d like a Bloody Tom,” Sherlock said, disdain curling the corners of the words.

“Aye, don’t we all,” said the taller man with an affected Cockney accent, and Sherlock revised his deduction: not working class at all but from a rather upper middle class family who would be greatly disappointed if they knew about his drinking; former petty thief; had an affinity for Dickens.

The door swung open; as they stepped into the large room the noise assaulted them first. Chants and jeers echoed off the bare-bones walls, insulation tucked haphazardly in between steel structural beams. The meaty sound of a fist hitting flesh, accompanied by an uptick in volume, left no doubt as to what kind of place Sherlock had brought John; the clatter of whisky bottles kissing shot glasses chimed in the background. The main attraction—two men with heaving chests who circled each other warily—was centered under a harsh spotlight. The rest of the room was dim; all the better for the discreet passing of bills.

Sherlock spotted an empty space in the standing-room-only crowd surrounding the raised ring and moved toward it, only to realize that John was still standing just in front of the door. His face was filled with so many emotions as to be completely inscrutable, even—or perhaps especially—to Sherlock, and the sight of it inspired a brief moment of dread. “John?” he ventured, suddenly uncertain.

“You, you brought me to an illegal boxing ring?” John asked, somewhat stunned.

Apprehension clouded over Sherlock. “You’ve been restless. In lieu of chasing after criminals you’ve had to resort to mundane domestic tasks, and those aren’t enough to satisfy,” Sherlock said, the words practically blurring together, “you crave the adrenaline; I thought that this might be an acceptable alternative, and anyway don’t bother worrying about the legality of it, it’s the gambling that’s illegal, not the boxing, although god knows why you’d worry about legality at this point—”

Shut _up_ , he thought frantically, and changed the direction of his monologue— “and there are plenty of your fellow service members in this room, just look at the tattoos, so you see, it’s fine, it’s all fine.” Having concluded his monologue, he looked anxiously at John.

John’s posture had not changed as Sherlock spoke, but now his self-contained lines broke: his chin tilted upwards and he laughed. He laughed low and fierce, a kind of darkness glittering in his eyes as his muscles tensed, ready to fight. “This is—actually, it’s perfect. I never would have dreamed of it.”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, relaxing fractionally. He stripped off his leather jacket in the sultry heat of the room and made his way across the sawdust and concrete floor to the open space he had seen, navigating his way through men who eyed him with caution. Leaning against a support, the cold steel a shock against overheated skin, he noticed that John seemed restless. He quirked an eyebrow.

“So. How do I get in?” John asked.

Sherlock pointed toward the man slouching on a stool by the corner of the ring, worn and nearly tattered legal pad in hand. “Billy. He’ll have gear that he can loan you. Warm up in that area with the mat in the corner.”

“Thanks,” John said, squaring his shoulders.

“Ask him who you’re up against,” Sherlock advised. “Then come over to me and I can point out their weaknesses.”

John’s stillness was poignant against the chaotic noise and motion of the room; Sherlock knew at once that he had done something wrong. “Thanks,” John said, not meaning it in the slightest, “but I’ve got it on my own, this time.” Before Sherlock could respond, he was gone. The crowd seemed to part for him slightly, wisely recognizing the power in his compact form, and Sherlock sighed as John struck up a conversation with Billy.

Maybe a drink wouldn’t hurt, he conceded after watching Billy and John chat like old mates. Billy clapped him on the back, guffawing, and Sherlock winced, scuffing a foot over the sawdust that littered the floor.

— _sawdust restaurants with oyster shells—_

Yes, a drink was certainly called for.

He abandoned his post and made his way over to the bar, a rather nice wooden counter that looked out of place in the converted warehouse. “Can I get you something?” a man behind the bar asked, not particularly bothering to listen for the answer.

“Whiskey, three fingers,” he ordered, softening his usual haughty facade. God, this was familiar: back alley hellholes were magnificent sources of intel the world over, and Sherlock had spent his fair share of time gambling in them, gaining trust and gathering vital information from creases in clothing and fleeting microexpressions; reading the clues that most people didn’t even know they gave off. Sherlock found himself tensing in preparation of inevitable danger and scolded himself. He rolled his neck to the side to loosen the muscles of his back.

The neck of the bottle clattered against the glass as the bartender poured the whiskey hastily. The man shoved it across the counter, clearly more interested in watching the current match than tending bar. Sherlock couldn’t blame him—the two fighters currently in the ring were clearly regulars to whom boxing was more a profession than a hobby; they circled each other with exact knowledge of the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Even he, accustomed as he was to judging a fighter’s pressure points at a glance, was hard pressed to deduce the winner.

Mesmerized by the almost hypnotic violence, Sherlock almost didn’t notice John warming up on the mat. It was the sprawling scar across a shoulderblade that caught his eye first, then recognition pulled at his mind: short silvering hair, glowing yellow in the industrial lights; wiry, compact body; a decidedly military aspect to his bearing.

Sherlock raised the glass to his lips to mask his slight inhale, the cheap whiskey burning on the way down. He leaned back against the bar, jacket folded carelessly over his forearm, and absently rolled the liquor around his glass as he watched John’s movements.

He’d schemed for _ages_ to get a glimpse of John’s scar; it was nothing short of infuriating to have such a vital part of John’s life hidden from him by jumpers and social convention. And here John was, clad only in pants in the humidity of the dim room, and the flow of data was almost overwhelming.

_Entry wound in the front of his shoulder, exit wound in the back, they shot him head-on, then, his files say that he was saving a soldier’s life at the time—unsurprising, really, if. . . good—he must have been in the thick of an ambush, and very few doctors are both competent and brave enough to agree to that, god he’s remarkable. The wound got infected, clearly whoever treated him wasn’t as meticulous as John himself was, he developed sepsis. Given proximity, he was likely treated in Germany; remembers little of it due to the fever and painkillers. Remarkable range of motion given the severity of the injury; given his skill he should have no significant trouble against any of the mindless brutes here._

The scar on the front of his shoulder was small, silver against the warmth of his skin; the back of his shoulder was far more interesting. The scar tissue was thick across much of the upper left of his back.

It was gorgeous, Sherlock thought, like a work of art: Mozart’s Requiem, perhaps, or a lesser known Van Gogh, but no, it wasn’t a landscape even though the broad streaks of color were right; Dali, perhaps, with its surrealistic distortions of the known world. Beautiful—no, _gorgeous_. His gaze slid from the glory of John’s scar to his other shoulderblade, tense as he threw punches at a bag, to the muscles of his back.

Turning around, John caught him out. At first confused, the look on his face appeared on the cusp of deepening into anger. Transfixed, Sherlock didn’t move despite his nagging sense of self-preservation demanding that he leave, pretend he hadn’t been caught admiring his flatmate’s lithe body. He refused to break eye contact. Adrenaline thrummed beneath his skin, heady, as John held his eyes.

And then: John’s eyes traveled the length of his body, skimming over the jacket and whiskey and lingering on the stretch of his vest and the snug fit of his jeans. Heat threatened to creep up his neck, completely separate from the sweltering heat of the crowded room, but he willed it away as John looked his fill. His mouth went dry and he took a sip of whiskey deliberately, tilting his head back just slightly as he swallowed, and John’s gaze came to rest on the long column of his neck. His eyes were dark, but Sherlock couldn’t read the expression in them.

Slightly, just slightly, John’s tongue licked at his lower lip.

And then Billy came over to John, placing a heavy hand on his forearm and pointing at the ring, and the moment was broken.

Stimuli rushed in from all directions, as though he had been underwater and had just broken the surface: the thud of the bass, vibrating his bones down to the marrow, the snippets of conversations, the constant rustle as feet shuffled sawdust; all of these were amplified in the sultry heat of the room. His navy vest clung to his lower back, damp with sweat, and he took another sip of whiskey to settle himself. The sharp, smokey liquor burned on the way down. It hurt in the best possible way.

But that wasn’t true: he wanted _more_ of something that he didn’t know how to describe—he wanted adrenaline flooding his veins, sweaty skin on sweaty skin, the bright bloom of copper in his mouth, the achingly brutal violence of a fight. Sherlock itched for it in a way that made cocaine pale in comparison.

He ran his fingers over the edge of the wooden bar, catching on a jagged scratch in the wood and worrying the splinters.

John entered the ring now, ducking between the two ropes that separated the spectators from the boxers, and stood in the corner with his back to Sherlock. The ref spoke to him quietly for a moment before John nodded. His hands, clad in black gloves, did not tremble.

This was a tight-knit community; newcomers did not appear frequently and therefore the room’s attention was on John as the ref signaled the start of the match. John and the man opposing him—one hundred sixty two centimeters and nearly twelve stone, by Sherlock’s estimate; favored his left leg slightly; scar on his biceps showed his experience with knives; a regular here, if the cheers were anything to go by—regarded each other for a moment before his opponent made the first move. A silly mistake: Sherlock could have told him that much. John ducked the right hook nimbly, feinting a swipe toward the other man’s stomach, and with that his opponent stopped holding back. They circled each other like magnets.

And this, _this_ was where John belonged, Sherlock thought, with adrenaline in his veins and a fight before him. The tense muscles of John’s back were highlighted in shadow, all the more lovely for the brutal efficiency behind the lines; the spotlight gleamed off the light sweat collecting on his skin. He needed the fight, _the thrill of the chase, the blood pumping through your veins—_

But no, he also belonged in the kitchen of 221b with the gentle curl of steam rising from the kettle and tea bags placed into two mugs; in the sitting room, medical journal in hand and a slight frown on his face as he fought not to admit that he needed reading glasses; in the bathroom with an alcohol swab and bandages, telling Sherlock crossly _you couldn’t have deduced that the vial was about to explode, could you_ with gentle hands cleaning out shards of glass from his fingers. He needed both of the extremes, all of it; one wasn’t enough. Domestic bliss with Mary had led him to storm a drug den. Too many cases with Sherlock had led him to confiscate Sherlock’s phone and laptop until they’d slept for more than three hours at a stretch. He needed the balance, and god, Sherlock had tried to give him that—given him Mary, for all the good that did; given John his heart as quietly as possible, with a minimum of fuss, so as not to startle John.

It was worth it. John was his one fixed point in a changing age, certain and solid and _fascinating._ Observing him was like thinking a puddle in the ground was made out of water, boring ordinary dull, and then seeing the rainbow striations of oil and realizing he had misjudged it completely.

No, that wasn’t right—it was a life of certainty and predictability and reading people at first glance, never being proven wrong except by an overbearing git of an older brother, and then the discovery that you’d misjudged someone hugely. Every time that John said something or contradicted him or revealed yet another brilliant facet it felt like a precious gift.

John landed a blow on his opponent and Sherlock’s attention snapped back to the present. His opponent, slightly cocky at the start of the match, now looked unnerved; John, on the other hand, wore a smile that was somehow filled with rage. He thought briefly of all of the pent-up anger John had stored for—well, six years, frankly—and almost felt sorry for the other man.

The other man lunged at John, who only executed a neat feint. He stumbled and nearly fell on his face, and that was his final downfall: John quickly wrapped him in a hold, arm around his neck. He didn’t stop fighting, clipping John with his elbow as he struggled, but conceded the inevitable after a moment.

The cheers that rang through the room had a bit of a menacing edge: the newcomer had proved interesting, but nearly all of them had bet against John and would now have to pay up. Somewhere in the room, there was a fellow who had made a fair deal of money—ah, there he was in the back corner, scraggly ginger goatee, smiling like a cat who got the cream.

John climbed down from the ring and made his back over to Sherlock, receiving many forceful pats on the back as he walked. They looked excessively forceful to Sherlock’s trained eye, but John never winced, only standing up taller against the painful praise. The elbow to his mouth had split his lip; he swiped at the blood with his tongue as he walked.

“So,” John said, sliding onto the seat next to him, facing the bar, “how did I actually do?”

Sherlock looked out at the ring in front of him, away from John and his still-bare chest. “Quite well.”

“Really?”

Sherlock turned his head to the right to study John. His tone almost sounded diffident, but there was a slight hint of mockery there as well. He’d seen Sherlock staring.

“Yes,” Sherlock said simply. “Did it help?”

“Did it help,” John repeated, his shoulders shaking in a gentle laugh—genuine, for the first time in days. His sweat-darkened hair shone. “Um. Yeah. It did, I think.”

Billy ambled over, yellow legal pad at his side. “Nice fight there, Johnny boy.”

“Thanks,” John replied, a bit of edge in his voice.

He only smiled. “Let’s get you a little something for that mouth, eh?” Reaching behind the bar, he grabbed the whiskey bottle and poured some on a worn, stained handkerchief that he produced out of his pocket. He held the alcohol-soaked cloth out to John, who started to laugh.

“And here I thought I’d seen the worst dregs of medicine in Afghanistan,” he quipped, accepting the handkerchief and pressing it to his mouth with only the slightest wince, “but it was in London all along.”

“Afghanistan, then?” Billy inquired, pouring John a glass of whiskey and topping off Sherlock’s. He nodded at the scar on John’s shoulder.

John nodded, a tight up and down motion of his head.

“I won’t pry, then. Thanks for your service, lad.”

“Mmm. Thanks for letting me fight tonight,” he said, taking a large sip of the liquor.

“Letting you?” Billy scoffed. “You’re welcome anytime, especially now that our gamblers have learned their lesson. You won’t be so easily underestimated next time, my friend.”

“Look forward to it,” John said with a fierce grin. Sherlock mentally calculated how long it would take for the wound on his mouth to heal. Perhaps John would want to come before it healed, however—it really did showcase that he was a skilled fighter—

“Sherlock,” John said, and god, was he still not wearing so much as a shirt? The sweat had dried on his skin, surely the evaporation would have led him to be cold by now.

He looked around and realized that Billy had left and John had likely tried to get his attention multiple times. “Yes?’

“Are you up for a round?” he asked, jerking his head back toward the ring.

He thought of physical limitation notices, the long-term effects of a bullet to the chest, with only a slight trace of bitterness. And in any case there was the matter of his back; he wouldn’t be allowed into the ring with a vest on and taking it off was out of the question. “I’m fine.”

“What, don’t tell me you’ve never studied hand to hand combat?” John asked, a teasing note to his voice.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Of course I have, as you well know. Baritsu. Taught by the very last master of it, in fact.”

“Well, then. Off you pop.”

Sherlock paused. John was teasing him, something that he had once done rather frequently but hadn’t since the debacle with Mary. This evening had accomplished his objective, and so he answered far more gently than he had originally planned. “Not tonight.”

John seemed to accept the finality in his tone. “Pity, that. I was looking forward to it.”

A harm heat stole across Sherlock’s cheekbones, and he wasn’t sure he could blame it on the ambient temperature. He felt vulnerable, exposed, even as he stood with a vest covering the scar tissue spanning his back and a leather jacket folded over the crook of his arm, subtly covering the fresh track marks. He still ached for something, but with John’s near-bare body so close to him the previously unknown quality of the want had crystallized: he wanted John, _wanted_ him.

The knowledge stole his breath away. It was no secret to him that he loved John, was in love with him; from nearly the first he had wanted to spend his life with this ordinary enigma of a man, a walking paradox. He had wanted John at his side always—on the streets of London, chasing a serial killer; on the couch at 221b with plates piled high with curry in front of them and crap telly playing—but whenever he had even dared to think about John in his bed it had been for simple comfort: the warmth of sleep-soft skin on sleep-soft skin, the gentle rise and fall of chests, the relief of waking up from a nightmare and having someone there to hold and comfort. His love was no lesser for lack of desire. He had wanted John for always.

But now: having seen John’s sweat-slick skin so bare and unabashed, he couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel against his own, how the salt of it would burst on his tongue as he mapped the tendons and sinews of John’s body with his mouth, how the weight of John on top of him would push him into the soft mattress of his bed—

 _Oh, god,_ Sherlock thought, half-sick with desire and fear. Looking back, he realized that this desire had been building slowly since he had come back from the dead, but this was his first conscious realization of it.

It terrified him. For the first time in his life, Sherlock _wanted_ someone that way, and it was his best friend in all the world. His best friend in all the world who was emphatically _not gay_ despite the way he was almost-barely-maybe flirting with Sherlock just now. Who had a pregnant wife. Who had a pregnant ex-assassin wife who almost certainly worked for Moriarty, and had run away with their unborn child for whom John was currently searching.

He tried to force it all down, but the fear remained. It clung to the back of his throat, bitter as mercury and every bit as poisonous.

“What, you wanted to see my bare chest?” Sherlock scoffed, aware as though from a distance that the words coming out his mouth were _not good, not at all good, abort_ , and unable to stop them from coming regardless. “I thought you saw it often enough in hospital.”

It worked: the playfulness on John’s face shut down. Soon only a bleak anger was left, deepening the dark spaces beneath his eyes.

“We should go,” John said abruptly. He downed the remainder of his drink quickly, slamming the glass down; the bartender glared from the other side of the bar. He stood, military-taut, and walked away.

Frantically, Sherlock searched for his billfold and tossed a note—far too large, really, but it didn’t _matter_ , nothing _mattered_ except catching up to John and apologizing—and ran after him, ignoring the questioning eyes that followed him.

He caught up outside the bar, grabbed John by the forearm as John had done to him only an hour ago. “I’m _sorry_ , I never meant—”

“—leave it.”

“—but I—”

“—I said _leave it_ , Sherlock.”

“But—” he protested.

“No buts.” John yanked his arm away from Sherlock. He was all too aware that they were on the pavement of a public street: people in the pubs were beginning to stare. They kept their voices low out of habit, even though the music spilling out of the buildings and the noises of traffic would drown out their argument. “Just tell me one thing. One thing, yes or no. That’s all I ask.”

Sherlock nodded slightly, frozen in place.

“You were watching me as I warmed up, weren’t you.”

“I—” he began, ready to explain that he was watching John’s technique or making sure that John didn’t injure himself, some explanation that would get him out of this bloody mess, but John interrupted again.

“Yes or no. Were you.”

His ribs threatened to shatter into shards of scarlet, one by one. “Yes.” It was a thing of triumph, the steadiness of his voice. He noted that he would soon be in danger of hyperventilating if his heart rate didn’t drop.

John sniffed, face contorting in a deadly quiet expression of concealed rage, and nodded. “All right, then.”

A taxi passed them on the road; at John’s outstretched arm it pulled to the curb. John got in as Sherlock hesitated, uncertain of his welcome. John pushed the door father open in silent invitation, his face inscrutable. He folded himself into the cab awkwardly.

The ride to the flat was silent. Sherlock paid the driver when they arrived and followed John up to the flat quietly, resigned to whatever John had in store for him.

At the door to 221b, John paused and looked at Sherlock. “Good night,” he said simply, and continued up the stairs to his bedroom without looking back.

Confused, Sherlock stood on the landing for a solid five minutes after he heard the click of John’s door shutting. Five minutes and thirteen seconds: he leaned against the door heavily. Once, just once, he ran his fingers through the curls at his temples and pulled, the slight ache phosphorescent. He kept his fingers tangled in his hair for a moment longer, chin tucked into his chest.

 _No, god, that was_ not good _, very not good, and it was all because you realized at the worst possible moment that had once again underestimated your feelings for John Watson. Really, you should just assume the pit to be bottomless; maybe that would be enough for you to quit. hurting. him._

In the meantime, there was still the small matter of making it through the night.

He considered his options, weighing them out on a delicate silver scale in his mind. The crystalline vial of morphine, the worn bag of cocaine, the small white oxycodone pills: they all beckoned. But there was an image overlaying the potential glories of the drugs, like an afterimage from looking at the sun: John’s face tonight, angry and hurt. If he saw Sherlock using, his face would look exactly the same.

_And you just said that you didn’t want to hurt him any more._

Fuck. He clenched his fist, momentarily forgetting that he was grasping his hair still, and winced as the follicles protested. Assessing himself, Sherlock was—not pleased—but okay. Fine. The alcohol still muddled through his system, dulling the ache that curled insistently through his veins during the long nights alone, and he had a carton of cigarettes tucked in the red persian slipper on the mantel. It would do.

Sherlock sighed, pushing himself off the wall and opening the door to the flat at last. It would be a long night, but he wasn’t—he wasn’t _addicted_ , not by any means. They heightened his thought process, that was all, and if it took time without to prove that—fine. He would lean out the recklessly open window and breathe in the frigid night air and smoke cigarettes until smoke curled so thickly in his lungs that he was dizzy. It would be fine.

It would all be fine.


	4. Chapter 4

Greg Lestrade rang the doorbell the next afternoon in three sharp bursts that made Sherlock’s head hurt. The aftereffects of the whiskey had included a slight headache, but that could be attributed to boredom. Or possibly even stress: John had simply walked into the kitchen that morning and acted as though everything was normal. Their new kind of normal, anyway—one cup of tea made for himself with a quietly suppressed rage that Sherlock watched uneasily, unwilling to get involved for fear of setting it off accidentally. If he was going to unleash the terrifying force of John’s rage, he wanted it to be focused on something of his choice. A serial killer, perhaps, who might at least come close to deserving it.

At the chimes, Sherlock sat bolt upright from where he had been reclining on the couch. “Case,” he announced decisively.

John only snorted. “With us all but on house arrest? Doubt it.”

But after Lestrade had been escorted upstairs by Mrs Hudson (“Really, Sherlock, I’m not your housekeeper. Now, I’ll bring some tea in, you look famished and the detective inspector really shouldn’t have to brave food poisoning when he visits—just this once, you understand,” she had said chidingly as she squeezed Sherlock’s shoulder), John looked to be wrong. Lestrade sat awkwardly on the couch, clearly torn between his friendship with the two men and duty, offering small compliments on the tea and biscuits until Sherlock broke in. “Out with it, Lestrade.”

“Maybe,” Lestrade said, biting the words off at the ends, “I’m here because we’re, I dunno, friends?”

“Hmm,” Sherlock said consideringly. “You are. But not _just_ as a friend, clearly—you wouldn’t be fidgeting and avoiding looking at John if there wasn’t business involved.”

His shoulders slumped at this, and he looked at John square on. “I’m sorry, John, and I don’t blame you for any of this mess. But a few days Mycroft took me aside and told me what’s happened and that I should come to you both with any particularly unusual events, and now—fuck, John, I’m so sorry.”

John nodded stiffly as Sherlock jumped straight to the _important_ part of the sentence—didn’t people _listen_? “Something unusual?”

Lestrade looked over at John once more, as though to verify that John had heard his apology, and then turned to face Sherlock. “Yeah. At the time I didn’t know what he meant by that, and when I tried to get more details he just told me I’d know it when I saw it, which is just—not fucking helpful, by the way, let him know. But he turned out to be right.”

“What _happened_?” Sherlock asked impatiently, attention focused like a laser.

“Assassination,” he said without preamble. “Came up in the system an hour ago: shots fired, one dead on arrival. And I know, I know, so don’t start on me—it’s London, and so on, but this is different.”

“Just _tell me_ —” Sherlock growled.

“Thought you’d want a chance to berate me first, but fine. CCTV and eyewitness accounts confirm that it wasn’t a close-distance shooting. It was a sniper, highly trained at that. That on its own was enough for Mycroft to pull it off the Met’s table entirely; the people who saw the info have been told that it’s being worked at a higher level, keep your mouth shut, and so on. That’s not even the best part, though,” Lestrade said, his face grim. “The victim was completely normal, nothing about him had even the slightest whiff of suspicion: he’s not the guy that you hire a gun for. So we did a background check, obviously, and—he doesn’t exist. At all. No records; facial recognition hasn’t found a match yet. Mycroft told me that he hasn’t been able to find a thing on this man, and from what I gather that’s rare.”

“It is,” Sherlock said absently, following five different tracks simultaneously. He went for the most likely. “A criminal, then. Mycroft would have found out if he had been intelligence; his spies are entirely too reliable. A rather powerful one at that. In this day and age _everyone_ leaves footprints, anonymity is highly prized: it would have required active work to erase his records from any sort of government system to the extent that the trail cannot be found. He must have been—”

And here the pieces connected, crystallizing into a vividly clear image: “He must have been near the top of Moriarty’s web.”

“Mixed metaphors,” John said, his first words since greeting Lestrade, “but yeah. Is the theory that this sniper is our new best friend or a new enemy?”

“Hard to tell, obviously,” Sherlock interjected, “but in general snipers make for bad friends. But now, now there’s a trail, we can find the building from where the man was shot, use CCTV to track the assassin; oh, this is brilliant, it’s Christmas, it’s a _lead_.” He swept off the sofa, nearly manic in his excitement, and John stood solidly beside him.

Lestrade looked between the two of them and sighed. “We’ll take a cab to the scene. This isn’t the Met’s, mind, talk to your brother if there are problems with access.”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, face momentarily contorting at the thought. “John, grab a map.”

“What?”

“You’ll see later. Off we go!”

The drive took less than five minutes, a fact for which Sherlock was grateful. Nearly two days sober he was jittery, desperate for movement, and he nearly leapt out of the cab as it pulled up to the curb. The rust-colored stain on the pavement was apparent immediately, but it garnered less attention than he would have thought. Good for their purposes.

Sherlock stepped just to the side of it, craning his head to look at the buildings overhead. Residential area: buildings were only a few stories tall. That worked in their favor. He turned to Lestrade and opened his mouth.

“Preliminary investigation shows that the shot came from that direction,” Lestrade said, beating him to it. “I’ve got photos—”

“John, hand Lestrade the map,” he ordered, and John gave him a baleful look but handed it over regardless. “Put the photos in the map, subtly, and pass it over to me.”

Lestrade did so as John raised his eyebrows at Sherlock. “You never used to care about prying eyes. Isn’t it obvious what we’re doing anyway?”

“Just a precaution,” Sherlock said. “Now Lestrade, hand the map to me.”

“Figured that bit out on my own, thanks.”

Sherlock unfolded the map and studied the photo briefly, overlaying the positioning of the body in the photos on the pavement in front of him. “Alright,” he said slowly, calculating trajectories, weather patterns, average kill distance of snipers—

“That one,” John said quietly, taking the map from Sherlock’s hand and pointing at a nondescript building just out of view. “The roof.”

Sherlock frowned at him, having just come to the same conclusion. “How did you—”

“Experience,” John said coldly.

“Do you mean that you saw plenty of gunshot wounds inflicted by snipers or that you perpetrated them?”

“Both,” John said, chin raised high in defiance.

The moment threw Sherlock for a split second before he reoriented himself, facts spiralling into place neatly. “The army would have been stupid not to train you for it, given your marksmanship. I’d just always assumed—”

“Yeah, well, bad fucking assumption—no, I don’t care what it was—and don’t we have something else to be doing right now?” John hissed, irritated, as Lestrade dragged a hand down his face in defeat. Ironically, Sherlock thought, they looked exactly like their cover: three men lost in the city and angry about it. Pity that cameras were so common; his and John’s faces were too recognizable. In any case, it was likely that they were being surveilled by someone who knew exactly what they looked like down to the millimeter if this case was what he thought it was.

Sherlock stared at John for a moment longer, recalculating. “Fine,” he said, and turned up his coat collar as he turned around and strode toward the building.

It was a decent five minute walk, even walking at a decent clip; Sherlock’s respect for the unknown sniper rose. They arrived at the building just as a tenant was leaving and walked straight in. The hallways were drab, painted in a horrid olive green and carpeted in an abstract pattern that was halfway between camouflage and stains from bodily fluids. They wound up the flights of stairs until they reached the roof.

His nerves got the better of him as he stared at the door to the roof, remembering another roof. Sherlock wondered if he would find Moriarty out on the roof, miraculously alive and bent on revenge; he shook his head at himself and opened the door.

This roof was empty, as he had known it would be: nothing more than a grimy stretch of concrete under an increasingly threatening sky. He walked to the far side of the roof, next to a vent from which smoke evaporated, and found what he was looking for. “John, take a look at this.”

John walked over, Lestrade a pace behind. Sherlock indicated the blackened rifle lying on the rooftop. “You were right.”

“Why is it—”

“The assassin took the shot and poured an accelerant, petrol by the smell, over the gun before striking a match; it removes DNA evidence and fingerprints,” Sherlock said, pondering, “but the question is, why? No one could trace it back quickly enough that they wouldn’t have been able to disassemble their gun, and leaving it here is like, like a calling card—oh.”

He stared at the metal. “It looks like a calling card,” Sherlock said slowly, “because it is one. Two objectives: they fulfilled one in killing the man, but that they left visible signs of it means that they _wanted_ me to find it for some reason. Not a benevolent one, I’m afraid. So what is their second objective?”

John said nothing, but crouched down at eye level with the concrete barrier that demarcated the edge of the roof. Sherlock understood at once: he was looking for other possible targets that could be reached from this particular building. “Brilliant, John,” he breathed. Turning to the adjacent wall, he knelt down as well.

“Do you even know what you’re looking for?” John asked.

Sherlock bared his teeth in a feral smile. “You aren’t the only one with _experience_ in this area, doctor. Or did you really think that I was just playing hide and seek when I was away?”

From the corner of his eye he saw John’s face turn to stone. Lestrade groaned. “Oh, for the love of god, two of my best mates, who also happen to be _police_ _consultants_ , have extensive experience with killing people. Brilliant; this is _not_ what I hoped to come away knowing. With all of your incredibly practical knowledge, can you tell me anything about this?”

“You know most of it,” Sherlock said absently, scanning the horizon and noting potential targets. “The shot was taken approximately two feet to the left of where the rifle now resides; it was set on fire next to a vent that typically releases smoke so that it wouldn’t be noticed. Anything else you need clarified?” He shuffled awkwardly to the left, assessing. He turned the corner, focused on the horizon—and caught his breath.

“I found it,” he said, and he was proud of the steadiness of his voice.

John came over and dropped to his knees beside Sherlock, so close that their arms brushed. He cursed. “Bloody buggering fucking hell. It’s—Greg, it’s 221b. The window to our sitting room.”

“It’s got to be over five hundred yards,” Sherlock calculated, “and it’s a very tricky shot.”

“I couldn’t,” John stated somberly.

“Nor I. But it’s not a bluff. This is very nearly the same shot that took down the victim—this was planned in detail,” he realized.

“Right,” Lestrade said, “you know that I have to let Mycroft know, sibling rivalry aside. This is your life we’re talking about.”

“Isn’t it always,” Sherlock said darkly. “The point is moot now that they _showed_ us their undetectable sniper nest. They can’t use it now, there’ll be security all over the building in minutes; ergo: I’m _fine_.”

“Right,” Lestrade said, thoroughly unconvinced. “We’re leaving. I’m going to tell Mycroft that the windows in your flat need to be bloody missileproof at this rate, and if they aren’t bulletproof at this exact moment then you’re going to a safe house. Both of you.”

“Of course they’re bulletproof,” Sherlock said, rolling his eyes. “Mycroft had them fixed after the explosion across the street. Snuck a few bugs in while he was at it, of course.”

“Fine,” Lestrade snarled. The first drops of rain started to fall, promising an imminent storm.

John had stood silently as they argued, but it was by no means a passive silence: his jaw clenched with the effort of keeping his mouth shut and his left hand spasmed at his side. He brought up the rear as they walked down the stairs and caught a cab.

Lestrade insisted on accompanying them back to Baker Street, although he didn’t speak to either of them; his ear was glued to his cell phone. Sherlock closed his eyes and tried to ignore the excessive concern that the man was showing. Honestly, it wasn’t as though _he_ had been threatened.

_This time._

The thought felt like an ironclad boot to the kidney. Sherlock physically winced, curling in on himself, and tried extremely hard not to think of the many people he had endangered simply by becoming their—what? Colleague? Brother? Tenant? Not friend, as a general rule; he didn’t have friends. Only John could maybe, possibly give him that description; but he had fucked it up as always, a million times over.

“Thanks, Greg,” John said in an undertone, and Sherlock realized belatedly that they were back at 221b. Greg nodded back, still on the phone, and Sherlock climbed reluctantly out of the car. “Um. Thank you,” Sherlock said before the door of the cab shut, “Greg.”

“Hang on a mo,” Lestrade said into the phone, and placed the phone’s speaker against his leg. “Sherlock, I’m here for you. We’re all here for you and John, okay? Be safe, and let us help you.”

He stood under the dark grey sky as the taxi pulled away from the curb, brake lights casting smeared scarlet blurs in the just-damp asphalt, gathering his courage to enter the flat. John was furious and scared and he couldn’t put it off any longer: John would have to explode, and soon.

He dragged himself up the stairs slowly and entered the flat to find John sitting silently in his chair with the tense stillness of a predator with the lights out. Turning on his favorite amber-striated lamp, he sighed loudly. Time to provoke a confrontation, and hope that they were both standing at the end of it.

“Didn’t think it would be such a surprise, really,” Sherlock said carelessly as he picked up his violin.

John cleared his throat roughly. “What?”

“The kind of work I’d done when I was away, obviously,” Sherlock said, facing away from him. He could see John’s reflection, distorted by the rivulets of rain that bled black and gold in the window; monitor his reactions: good.

“I,” John started before faltering. “I never—thought about it.”

Sherlock hummed, a bitter undertone seeping through. “You really didn’t, did you.” He noted, dimly, that John was not the only one in need of a fight. Anger, long-hidden, simmered molten in his gut.

Croatia: three months. Venezuela: seven weeks. Azerbaijan: six days. Tibet: two weeks. Mongolia: nine days. Russia: one month. Las Vegas, Moscow, Caracas, Rio, Beijing, Manhattan, Paris, Madrid, countless other smaller cities indistinguishable from one another in their grit and poverty and seedy underbelly. Three years spanning the globe and dismantling, piece by piece, Moriarty’s empire; three years on the hunt, hiding, infiltrating, killing. Alone.

And John had never even thought—?

Sherlock nodded slowly. Out the window he could see the clouds gathering in on themselves, darkening the sky to an electric charcoal. The storm would come soon, as it must, the wind was already beginning to shriek. “And you had more important things to be thinking about.” He raised his violin to his shoulder, bow lightly touching strings.

“Of course I did,” John said, and he could hear the fury rising behind the tone, the tide being pulled out to sea before a tsunami. “You had just come back from the dead, you unbelievable cock. I couldn’t decide whether to kill you or kiss you for the first six months.”

His words hung frozen in the air, electric: Sherlock could taste the ozone, crackling and silvery and dangerous. John pushed himself off of his chair and strolled languidly, lethally, to stand behind Sherlock’s back.

“You haven’t killed me yet, despite repeated opportunities,” Sherlock observed, heart pounding beneath his dispassionate exterior.

“No. I haven’t.”

Sherlock closed his eyes as John came to stand in front of him. He heard the soft sound of cloth unfolding: John was shutting the curtains, and this, this infuriated him nearly as much as John’s cool control. “Ah, yes, as I recall you always did prefer closed curtains,” he said spitefully. “Remember how we _danced_? And you claimed you didn’t kill me.”

“There’s a _sniper_ who had our front window in their crosshairs for god only knows how long. You idiot, this isn’t about secrecy. Don’t make it easier on them to kill you!” John yelled angrily, unable to contain himself.

“Why does it _matter_?” Sherlock asked. “It’s not like anyone would even care.” Everything was coming apart, unfolding like a house of cards in a strong wind, and Sherlock no longer cared. No more conversations judged in the fragility of a reflective surface: John was in his face, dark and furious and tense. “And as for more _important_ things—I can think of one.” And he lifted his violin and began to play John’s waltz, the one he had played at their wedding as he had stood in front of a party and watched the candles in front of him and thought that the flames of hell would be preferable to this.

He had barely passed through the first notes when John’s hand grasped his forearm tightly, attempting to yank the bow away from the violin, and the string snapped.

It was a cracking noise more suited to the destruction of wood than the snapping of a string, and they both froze in shock. And then Sherlock vaguely, as though from far away, noticed a stinging pain on his hand; the string had recoiled and hit his hand hard enough to draw blood.

John pulled the violin out of his frozen hands and inspected the damage. The string curled into frayed spirals; the bridge was cracked, forced to move by the release of tension.

Sherlock didn’t know what would happen next. Once upon a time, John would have cleaned the wound for him despite his anger. The tension would have diffused as John tended to him, swabs in hand. But this was unprecedented.

Deliberately, John placed the violin on the desk, then tugged the bow out of Sherlock’s lax hand and placed it beside the broken violin. Lacing his fingers underneath the palm of the injured hand, he inspected it in the dim light before raising their joined hands up to his mouth and brushing his lips over the gash. The saliva burned as John’s tongue swept over the wound, and Sherlock inhaled sharply.

And then he wrapped his hand in Sherlock’s collar, pushed him against the curtain-covered window, and kissed him.

John’s lips landed on his, warm and fierce and possessive, and Sherlock tasted his own blood mingling with that from John’s split lip. His back pressed against the window—he wondered hazily if the distortion of the curtain would be visible from the street—and John pressed against his front, solid, chest to chest and, god, hips to hips. One of John’s hands let go of his shirt to curl around the back of his neck and pull him further into the kiss. Sherlock whimpered, the sound parting his lips and encouraging John’s tongue to sweep lightly over the seam before invading his mouth. Their tongues met, the taste of John making Sherlock dizzy. His knees were less steady than he’d prefer.

Pushing him against the window harder, John pressed at him until there was no spare room, and Sherlock felt grounded against the pressure, overbright. Simultaneously safe and terrified. John’s mouth descended—he whined at the loss—and sucked a bruise high on his neck, the pain sharp and aching and fucking gorgeous. Sherlock stared at the worn green wallpaper, slightly out of focus in the half-light, as John worked at his neck. Words threatened to tumble out of his mouth in half-formed murmurs and John pulled back.

Their eyes met, and Sherlock saw in them what he had known all along: that this was not an act of love. Love might be present beneath the surface, but over top of it was a festering layer of anger and resentment and pain and fear. John’s eyes were bright with all of these.

“I could do anything, couldn’t I?” John asked slowly, still pressing Sherlock into the cold pane of the window. “You wouldn’t stop me.”

“Only because I want it,” Sherlock said, half-gasping, and John laughed lowly. Sherlock could feel the vibrations through his chest.

“You do, don’t you,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “You really do. Christ. You want me.”

Sherlock could hear the wind scraping over the window outside. “Yes,” he said, impatient, “yes, I want it all, I want everything you can possibly give me, you can’t have just realized that, you _can’t_.”

“Anything?” John asked.

Half-pleading, Sherlock said “Yes. Anything.”

“You’ll do anything I tell you,” John clarified, and Sherlock nodded, still slightly out of breath. John watched him, shadow-cast eyes intent before reaching a conclusion; rejecting it; deciding on a different course of action. This time he is resolute, back wired with steel, and Sherlock knew what he wanted before John vocalized it.

“You already know what I’m going to say, you daft, sodding genius, so I won’t bother,” John told him, the hand at the back of his neck reaching into his curls and gripping loosely. “Traffic light system. Green means go, yellow means slow down and pause, red means stop. Surely you can remember that. Hard limits?”

Air was suddenly harder to force into his lungs, though not for lack of want. John watched him as though he expected protest, so he threw his words down like a challenge. “None.”

John raised an eyebrow. “Really.”

“All the better for you, isn’t it?” Sherlock asked mockingly, and the hand gripping his curls tugged. He gasped, shutting his eyes against the unexpected pain-pleasure. Electricity shot down his spine and pooled low in his belly, and he found himself thrusting his hips against John’s involuntarily.

“Not the moment to debate the complexities of BDSM power exchange,” John grunted, circling his own hips against Sherlock’s, “but tell me now that you will use the bloody safewords.”

“I will,” Sherlock gasped, not particularly caring what he was agreeing to, his skin was touching John’s and their hips were grinding together and as long as that continued he would gladly agree to anything, anything at all, “I promise I will, just—”

His words cut off as John slid a thigh between his legs. God, it felt good, almost overwhelmingly so, and he groaned and threw his head back against the window, the glass reverberating from the force.

“So responsive,” John whispered against his neck, and abruptly withdrew his leg. “Bedroom. Now.”

Sherlock panted for a moment, trying to get his bearings. Yes, this was his sitting room; his flat; his army doctor, watching and waiting for him to move—

He pushed off the window unsteadily and John hummed with faux-approval. “Well done, you.” He nodded toward Sherlock’s bedroom and he moved without conscious thought. Behind him he heard John going over to the bookshelf and picking up—wait—wait—

John did not try to hide the riding crop from him, knowing that any attempt would be unsuccessful; he tapped it against his thigh as he walked before depositing it carelessly on the vanity. Sherlock looked at it, wide-eyed.

“Give me a color,” John ordered, quieter but no less commanding in the small space of Sherlock’s bedroom. He went over to the door and shut it with a slight click, twisting the lock. Sherlock’s stomach curled with anticipation.

“Green.”

John smirked. “I thought so.” The lines of his face were just visible in the amber lights of the streetlamp; the only other light in the room was the faint crack under the door. So we’re to be in the dark, even in this, Sherlock thought bitterly.

He wouldn’t trade it, any of it. He was selfish enough to want John in any capacity that he could have him, and this: it was more than Sherlock had dreamt of, during an invisible lifetime of fighting and hurting and giving.

“You always did like the whip,” John continued, almost casually. “And then after you rescued Irene Adler—I know about that, have always done, by the by—you started to keep it on the bookcase. A souvenir?” He unbuttoned his plaid shirt, shucked it to reveal a tight vest. “You won’t be able to look at it without thinking of me now.”

Sherlock stood at the foot of the bed, facing John in the darkness. “You say that like I’m not _always_ thinking of you,” he said, the sentiment no less true for the vitriol with which he hurled it at John, and his face contorted slightly into an expression that Sherlock couldn’t read before smoothing out again.

John took a step closer, a predatory air about him, and pushed Sherlock back onto the bed. Gracelessly, Sherlock fell onto the bed with a gasp. John’s hands curled behind his knees, spread his legs, pulled him closer to the edge.

“Well,” John said, standing in the vee of Sherlock’s legs and looking down at him, “I promise that you’ll be thinking about me now.”

The air around Sherlock seemed to thicken. Time moved honey-slow; all that Sherlock knew was the feel of John’s legs resting against his inner thighs and then—inconceivably—John’s hands unbuttoning his shirt, working from the neck down and pulling the tight fabric to the side as soon as each button slipped from its noose, as though he needed to see Sherlock’s bare skin immediately and couldn’t wait for even a moment. Sherlock shivered, hoping it would go unnoticed in the dim light.

John finished unbuttoning the shirt, pushing the thundercloud fabric to the sides of his chest and turning to his trousers, and god, how had he never realized just how obscene the clanking of a belt buckle and the metallic cinch of a zipper was? He writhed, John’s hands so very close to where he wanted them, _needed_ them, and John’s calloused hands pushed his hips down into the mattress roughly.

“Stay. Still.” His words were laced with command as his hands moved from holding him down, framing his jutting hipbones, to pull at the sides of his trousers. John removed them expertly as Sherlock tried not to make any noise, even the rasp of fabric against his skin almost overwhelming with the knowledge that it was John who was undressing him. John stepped away to throw his trousers on the floor and Sherlock felt the absence of him keenly, missed the warmth emanating from his body, but he stepped back in between his legs again and pulled at the waistband of his pants. He stripped them off efficiently.

Vulnerable: naked but for the shirt pushed off his chest, _wanting_ in an undeniable manner—but John was the one looking down at him with a kind of helpless longing in his eyes. Sherlock arched his back off the mattress at the brush of denim against the delicate skin of his inner thigh, relishing the way that John looked half-broken as he watched with dark eyes.

“That’s enough, I think,” he said, and raked his nails down the plane of Sherlock’s thighs, not hard enough to draw blood but enough to sting. He sucked in a sharp breath.

John climbed onto the bed and straddled his hips. Sherlock quivered underneath him, desperate for contact, but John only smirked and moved further up so that his weight rested just above where Sherlock craved it. “I’ve seen how you wear the softest fabrics,” he whispered above Sherlock, running his hands lightly over his chest, callouses catching on his bare skin. The fleeting weight of the touch itched, almost burned. “So you must be very, _very_ sensitive.” He leaned down and laved a line along Sherlock’s collarbone with his tongue to prove the point, and Sherlock moaned. He felt both perfectly safe, pinned down as he was by John, and unmoored from reality. The darkness disoriented him, and he shut his eyes.

John’s hand traced a line between his pectorals as his mouth moved upward, biting at the skin behind Sherlock’s ear, and suddenly his nipple was being twisted between John’s fingers. He keened, surprising himself with both the noise and the white-hot flare that sparked through his body, afterglow fading through his veins as he arched toward the stimulation; John didn’t stop, repeated the move on Sherlock’s other nipple while pinching the first one, and as he gasped for breath John’s lips met his in a bruising kiss.

He hadn’t known it could be like this, and he wondered distantly, as John hooked an arm underneath his back and roughly pulled him further up the bed, if this would be worth it, even if this were their last night.

Still straddling him, John grabbed both of his wrists and pinned them above his head, pressing tightly enough to leave bruises. Yes, Sherlock thought deliriously, let him leave physical proof of his presence on my skin.

“If you don’t stay still,” John said, a hint of a threat in his voice, “I’m going to have to tie you up.”

His eyes widened at Sherlock’s reaction: his lips parted slightly, pupils dilating, as his hips bucked up involuntarily. “Well,” he said, pressing Sherlock’s wrists down harder, “someone likes that idea.” He climbed off of Sherlock, crossing to the closet.

“Handcuffs on the bottom shelf, right side,” he said, the words coming out less precise than he’d thought they would; he heard them as though from underwater, traveling in little air pockets. John laughed darkly.

“Yes, I suppose you _would_ have those,” he muttered, finding them easily. He shucked his own vest and jeans before climbing back on the bed, on top of Sherlock. The handcuff encircled his right wrist first, the hard-edged steel against his already tender wrist wringin yet another noise from his parted lips. John brought his wrists up to the bars at the head of the bed and slipped the handcuffs around one, the metal on metal clinking, before snapping the second cuff on Sherlock’s wrist.

Oh, god, he thought he’d been vulnerable before. Now he couldn’t move, couldn’t get away. Couldn’t hide. He was stretched out, lean pale limbs on display, for John’s pleasure. The loss of control should have terrified him, but he found himself sinking into the sensory stimuli: the inexpensive cotton of John’s pants against his hips, the predatory heat of John’s gaze on him. He could feel it even with his eyes closed. John burned like the sun.

John leaned over him, his scent surrounded Sherlock in a warm combination of salt and copper and tea, and placed his mouth on Sherlock’s nipple.

“Fuck,” he said sharply, pulling at the handcuffs—and _oh_ , that bit into his wrists—as John laved at the nub of flesh with his tongue almost tenderly. Sherlock arched into the heat of it, and then John bit down. “Fuck!”

John didn’t stop, even as he thrashed underneath him, only alternating between soft suckling and hard nips in an unpredicatbale pattern that left Sherlock gasping, shaking, unable to control his reactions. After a moment, John pulled off.

His chest ached, the pain corresponding the his groin. “Tell me,” he heard John say slowly from in the darkness, “what you want.”

The words took a moment to register. “I thought,” he took a shaky breath, the inhale broken into two parts, “that this was about what you wanted.”

“Oh, it is,” John said, and even in his almost-drugged state he could recognize the low note of amusement in his voice. “So think about it, genius: what do I want you to ask for?”

He fought his way up and remembered the black leather riding crop sitting innocuously on his nightstand. “Please will you hurt me.”

“Of course,” he said, and dug the crescent of his fingernail against the nipple that he hadn’t spent the past few few minutes toying with. “Like this?”

“Yes,” he gasped, and he didn’t, _didn’t_ whimper. But that wasn’t right— “I mean, no. I want—please, John, just give it to me!”

“Tell me what you want.”

“Oh, god,” Sherlock said, shutting his eyes tight against the unrelenting ache. “Please use the crop, _please._ ”

“Gladly,” John said, releasing the nub of flesh, and the ache was even sharper as blood flowed back into his nipple. “Give me a color anyway.”

“Green.”

“Thought so. Now turn over.”

When Sherlock was slow to move, wondering how to best accomplish this objective with his hands restrained, John loosed a blow of the skin of Sherlock’s hip. It was just hard enough that Sherlock could feel his skin swelling in the wake of the contact. It was _too much-not enough-fantastic-brilliant_ , and giving up on dignity, he rolled over onto his front, hands crossed left over right over his head. He buried his face in the familiar fabric of his pillow and waited for the first blow, but it didn’t come.

“Sherlock.” John’s voice was rough, unsteady, and that was when Sherlock knew the room wasn’t dark enough. The riding crop hit the floor with a gentle thump. “Your. Your back.”

He didn’t know how the scars on his back looked now. It had been over a year since the wounds had been inflicted, more than in many cases, but he knew them only by the slightly textured ridges on his skin and the way they ached when rain was coming. They ached at the moment, in fact, in sympathy with the storm hovering over them, waiting to unleash its full fury.

“Keep going,” Sherlock whispered into the pillow, hunching his shoulders in on himself.

“No, fuck, no, we are not going to keep going. Sherlock, you have scars all across your back, and those didn’t used to be there.”

“They aren’t from a riding crop,” Sherlock offered, exasperated, “it’s _fine_.”

“It is bloody well not. Red. I’m ending this. Sherlock. . .” John’s voice trailed off and his fingers trailed lightly across his back, feeling out the full catastrophe.

Caught between shame and fury, Sherlock felt a vicious satisfaction flare through him at John’s reaction. He really, truly hadn’t known, had he; and now he could see it: physical proof of Sherlock’s sacrifice, carved into his skin. He hated himself for the vindication it brought him; wanted the sooty-thick feel of it to rise into his mouth, curl around his tongue, and smother him.

“Please keep going,” Sherlock said again, and he hated himself even more for the way that his voice sounded broken.

He felt John’s fingers run gently behind the shell of his ear, finding yet another scar that disappeared into his curls. “Look at me, please.” He shook his head into the pillows, called himself a thousand different kinds of coward.

“Look at me.”

John’s voice had the note of command in it again, and Sherlock turned his face to the side before he thought better of it. John was kneeling by the side of the bed, their faces level. “Hello, you beautiful man.”

“John,” Sherlock whispered, voice cracking, and he could see tears shining in John’s eyes. The lines of John’s face were broken, his eyes rumpled and sad. He ached to see it; knew that he was once again the cause.

“Why did you want me to hurt you?” John asked quietly, his voice no more than a whisper.

Sherlock thought for a moment, averting his eyes. “You deserved to,” he said simply. “And I—deserve it.”

“No, _no_ ,” John said fiercely. He shook his head. A car drove on the road beneath them, the glow of the headlights skittering across the wall of the room before vanishing. “You don’t, god, you don’t—”

“Please,” Sherlock whispered for the last time, and closed his eyes. He didn’t know what he would do if John left, decided to quit this, quit Sherlock, once and for all.

The rustle of feet on hardwood indicated that John was standing up, preparing to leave, and Sherlock turned his face into the pillow once more. He hoped that John would at least undo the handcuffs before he left—he could do it himself, if course, he wondered if he would ever be bothered to. Maybe he would just stay there forever.

“Okay,” John said heavily. “Okay.” He carded his fingers through dark curls and pulled, far more gently than he had before, encouraging Sherlock to look up it him. “I will give you this. But. Swear to me that you will use safewords if you are even the slightest bit uncomfortable. Have you changed your mind about any hard limits?”

“No,” Sherlock said, relief coursing through his veins. He relaxed into the tight grip of the cuffs and the gentle hand brushing through his hair.

“Do you have any preferences, then?”

Sherlock thought hazily through the waves of pleasure cascading through him, far softer and yet more immersive than before. “Touch me harder. If it’s too light it itches.”

John’s hand stroked down his back, firm, and Sherlock sighed. “Like this?”

“Yes. I like what you’re doing with my hair, too.”

“That’s good,” John said, slightly choked. “Tell me if I make you even the slightest bit uncomfortable.”

“Okay,” Sherlock said. John nodded once and climbed back onto the bed, straddling his lower back. His weight settled, pushing Sherlock’s hips down into the mattress.

God yes, this what what he wanted. He wondered what John would do next: he hadn’t picked up the whip again, wasn’t in the right position to spank him. His options were severely limited; what did John plan to do?

John’s plan, it transpired, was lean down over Sherlock’s back, cage his body in between his thighs and forearms, and kiss the back of his neck. John’s heat soaked into Sherlock’s skin, warming him from the inside out; John’s lips pressed firmly against every bit of skin that caught his fancy. After a moment, his deduction delayed by a blur of pleasure and slow-building want, he realized that John was kissing his way down Sherlock’s back, scar by scar.

“John,” he murmured, suddenly uneasy.

John stopped immediately, but didn’t move away. “Give me a color.”

“Green, but. . . what are you doing?”

John nipped gently at a scar on his shoulderblade before answering. “I’m kissing you. Is the pressure too light?”

“No, but—”

“You can always, always use your safewords,” John assured him. And then he resumed kissing Sherlock’s skin, making his way leisurely down his back. By the time he had reached the small of his back Sherlock was panting slightly, still confused. He had wanted it to hurt, but this was a different kind of hurt; John’s tenderness—there was no other word for it—made his knuckles ache with longing. He already grieved the moment that John’s skin would leave his, because John would surely leave then. Leave for good.

John deposited a small, almost chaste kiss at the hollow of his lower back—his gut clenched with want—and draped himself over Sherlock’s back. He rested his nose at the junction where Sherlock’s neck met his shoulder, nuzzling lightly before his lips met the skin in an openmouthed kiss. Teeth scraped over the tendon of his shoulder and Sherlock shivered once more. The weight of John pressed firmly on his hips, grinding them into the mattress; he moved them in tiny circles and felt John’s approving hum.

“There you go,” he said, planting a kiss along Sherlock’s neck before sucking on his earlobe, and Sherlock tossed his head back, narrowly avoiding hitting John.

“Oh, god,” he moaned, aroused and confused and a little upset because this _wasn’t how it was supposed to go_. John wasn’t supposed to act as though he—he cut the thought off ruthlessly but it didn’t matter because John’s lips were pressing so gently and sweetly against the nape of his neck that the conclusion was inevitable, undeniable: loved him.

John wasn’t supposed to act as though he loved him.

But this, this wasn’t sex, it was making love. And John seemed less than inclined to stop. His throat tightened and he spoke. “Wait.”

Once more, John stopped without moving further. “Color?”

“I don’t—No. I. . .” His mind seemed to have fucked off while John was kissing his neck, which was supremely irritating and yet not nearly as important as getting John’s mouth back on his skin. “I don’t want this. Tenderness.” He tried to spit the words out but they dried up in his throat and came out weak, sad. “Don’t lie to me.”

John dipped his head, resting his forehead on Sherlock’s shoulderblade. “Okay. Give me a color.”

Sherlock remained silent as John’s hand smoothed comfortingly over his side. Words were—god, never so useless as they were today, right now, in this moment.

“Sherlock,” John said after a minute of silence, their breaths evening out in sync, “I think that there’s maybe a reason that you’re not giving me a color, and it’s because you don’t actually want me to stop. But it, um, scares you, maybe. And that’s too much to ask you at the moment, particularly given that you’re still halfway in subspace, so: do you want to change our safeword system? Because at the moment we’ve negotiated that we’ll stop or pause if either of us says red or yellow, but I. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sherlock thought for a moment, grounded by the secure warmth of John’s body on top of his. “I want,” he said and paused, “I want to keep the safewords. But if I say stop. I mean it.”

“Okay,” John said with relief, and he placed another kiss behind Sherlock’s left ear. “Now where were we?” He nosed down Sherlock’s spine, stopping at C4 and sucking at the overlaying skin. Sherlock’s breath left him in a sharp exhale, and it was a moment before he realized John was still talking. “I remember now. You, you said I was lying to you.”

John swung a leg off Sherlock’s back and sat to his side, and Sherlock wanted to keen at the loss of contact. Gently, John’s hands rolled him onto his back, hands still stretched taut above his head. He heard the slither of elastic being pulled off and realized that John was taking off his pants, and his mouth went dry.

John climbed back onto the bed from the foot of it, settling himself over Sherlock’s prone body once more, forearms resting on either side and one leg entwined between. He nosed along the line of his collarbone, placing biting kisses at the spots that struck his fancy, and Sherlock would have imagined himself to be floating if he wasn’t so keenly aware that John hadn’t finished speaking.

“I have lied,” John acknowledged, breath huffing against his chest. “And I’m—fuck, I’m sorry, more so than I can ever say about so many things. But, and this I swear to you, I am not lying to you tonight. Not about anything.”

“But that would mean—” Sherlock started before cutting himself off, chest constricting, and John hovered over him once more, their lips nearly touching.

“It would, wouldn’t it,” and his voice was steady like his hand was when he fired a gun. John placed his left hand in front of Sherlock’s mouth. “Lick.”

Sherlock did, frantically lapping at the skin of his hand and tasting the lovely bitter salt, and then John removed his hand and aligned their hips and grasped them both in his hand and _oh_.

“Oh god, oh god,” Sherlock gasped, over and over, and he was vaguely aware of a high whining sound coming from the back of his throat, uncontrollable, and then John’s lips met his in a fierce kiss and he was aware of nothing except the feel of John against him: John’s tongue, licking into his mouth and swallowing his little cries; John’s hardness against his, searingly hot; John’s hand, rough with callouses and slick with saliva and just this side of too much, too good.

When he came it felt as though the universe was being compressed, all of time and space and the stars folding together into an infinitely small space no bigger than an atom before expanding out again in a terrifying explosion, a mobius strip of life and death, and he finally understood why people cared about the stars and the vast neverending universe around them: it was the only thing glorious enough to contain this experience. He could hear John’s low groan, feel the contractions of his lower back, and then John slumped against him for only a moment before pushing up wearily.

“No, no,” Sherlock pleaded, terrified, “don’t leave, I promise—”

“I’m just going to unlock the handcuffs,” John promised quietly before proceeding to do exactly that. He looked around the shadows of the room for a moment before spying his pants, crumpled at the foot of the bed, and carefully cleaned off Sherlock, painfully tender, before swiping at himself. These things accomplished, he slide into bed beside Sherlock, who grabbed onto him. Given the opportunity to hold John, Sherlock found that he never wanted to let go. He was vaguely aware that he must be crushing John but he didn’t care, he was shaking and salty liquid was leaking from the corners of his eyes—tears, his mind supplied, those are called tears—but John only pulled him into the safety of his chest and held him. John carded fingers through his curls gently, the other hand tucked firmly around the curve of Sherlock’s waist, and Sherlock buried his nose in John’s collarbone and quietly shook to pieces as he had never allowed himself to do.

The rain pounded the pavement outside, thunder rumbling and lightning sparking.

John held him patiently for the better part of an hour, allowing Sherlock to tremble in his arms, and at one point he was aware of a tear landing on his forehead before a pair of thin lips kissed it away, and he knew that John was just as broken and terrified and hurt as he himself was.

“I broke it,” he mumbled into John’s skin at one point, and John, bless him, understood immediately.

“No you didn’t. We’ll get it restrung in the morning and it’ll be good as new,” he promised.

Sherlock shook his head slightly, still curled as tightly into John as he could possibly be. “No, it won’t be.”

John was quiet for long moments and he started to think that that was the end of the conversation, but then John spoke. “Of course it won’t be,” he said, with such depth that he knew they were no longer talking about a violin. “But what else is there? You can get a new one, of course,” he added, too quickly.

“No,” Sherlock said, tightening his grip. “ _No._ ”

“Okay,” John said soothingly, tucking a curl behind Sherlock’s ear tenderly. “Okay.”

He had no idea how much time had passed by the time he raised his head from John’s chest. His face was still damp, as was John’s chest, and he was all too aware of his red eyes and blotchy skin. Still, he felt he owed it to let John know that he was okay now, and so he lifted his head and whispered “Hello” very quietly.

“Hello,” John whispered back to him, brushing a kiss over his forehead. And then: “We need to talk.”

He recoiled reflexively. “No we don’t.”

“Yes, we do.”

“What _about_?”

John laughed, the sound full of hurt and sorrow. “You need to ask? God, Sherlock, I. . . didn’t know.”

“Obviously.”

“Will you—” John hesitated, trying to see if this was allowed, and then pressed on regardless. “Will you ever tell me about them?”

Sherlock shrugged a shoulder as best he could while laying down, watching the rain through the window. It showed no signs of stopping. “I did intelligence work, as you’ve no doubt gathered; the nature of the work is dangerous. I was captured, multiple times. The worst of it happened in Serbia.”

John’s hand ran soothingly down his spine, spreading warmth in its wake. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched him so gently—certainly it had been before Serbia, if not decades previous—and it made his eyes sting once more, counterintuitively. “John,” he said haltingly, “I don’t want your pity. If this is just—”

“No,” John interrupted firmly, “this isn’t _just_ anything. I understand, and no. You deserve more than pity, and quite honestly far, far more than me, this. . . this isn’t an act of charity. Um. Quite the opposite. Which leads me to my next point.” He paused, licked at his lip as he figured out how to phrase it. “Were you okay doing that scene with me? If I’d known that—well, I’d have done it differently.”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, somewhat offended. “I do _like_ it, you needn’t worry that you coerced me into anything. I’m quite happy to do it again. And I’m physically stronger than you, I could have ended it at any time.”

“Not the point. So very not the point,” John repeated, looking pained. “That’s arguable at best, given my army training and your borderline malnutrition, and in any case you’re in something of an altered mental state when you’re subbing. The dynamics are different, that’s why it’s so important to discuss boundaries beforehand.”

“I wanted it.”

“Yes. Good. But. . . we aren’t doing it again until you can give me a better idea of what I need to avoid. And quite honestly, until I’m certain that you aren’t just doing it to punish yourself and that I’m not doing it to punish you. That’s not good. Ever. The way this started—I never want to lay a hand on you in anger. Even if you consent. So we’re putting this on hold until we figure out boundaries.”

“Fine,” Sherlock grumbled, somewhat mollified by John’s hand still stroking over his spine. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” John said on a quick inhale. “This. This ought to have come first, maybe, before anything. Certainly before tonight. But I always thought you knew and it wasn’t until tonight that I thought about it. Realized that maybe you didn’t.”

John’s hand trailed gently down the right side of his face, running through the curls at his hairline before sweeping a thumb across his lower lip and finally cupping his cheekbone, forcing Sherlock to look directly at him.

John’s face was guileless, open and honest and still slightly pained, and he ducked his head toward his chest before speaking again. “I love you. Have done always, maybe, if I’m being honest about it. You terrify me sometimes, god you’re so brilliant, so bright, just standing next to you is like being pulled into an inferno or maybe a thunderstorm. And I’m—me. Ordinary. Dull. I didn’t think I’d ever be enough.”

“You idiot,” Sherlock interrupted, enraged, “how can you not see? You’re—everything. Sometimes I think that you’re every paradox ever created crammed into a single impossible person with an occasional psychosomatic limp. You aren’t _ordinary_ or _dull_. Six years I’ve known you—John, I’ve always known everyone within a moment of meeting, their worst habits and dull routines and casual vices, and I couldn’t figure you out. I still can’t. You’re better than a locked room _genocide_.”

He rested his chin lightly on John’s collarbone and looked up at his face, attempting to catalogue the expression flitting across his face in the crumpling of his eyebrows, the slight purse of his lips, the way the left corner of his mouth tilted slightly downward, and belatedly realized that perhaps comparing John to a genocide was, perhaps, not good. “John? That wasn’t—um.”

And then John broke and started to laugh, the vibrations starting low in his belly and the rich sound of it bubbling out of his lovely mouth, and Sherlock could feel it pass straight through him as though it was his own laughter. A slight smile twitched at the corners of his own mouth, concerned as he was.

“Christ,” John managed after a moment. “You know, I don’t know what I’d expected. But I think that that statement right there convinced me. If I’d ever doubted it, and I really shouldn’t have. You love me. My god, you love me.”

“Oh. That’s—um,” Sherlock mumbled as a blush rose on his cheekbones, turning his face against the warmth of John’s neck, but John had other ideas. He captured his mouth in a kiss, snogging Sherlock until they were both panting, out of breath, stealing kisses in between sips of air.

Slowly the darkness pressed in on them, softened their movements, and John pulled back. “This doesn’t fix everything. You know that, of course.”

He nodded tentatively. “Yes.” Sherlock wished it would; he wasn’t imbecilic enough to expect so.

“I’ve hurt you so many times,” John murmured, and took his left hand in his, entwining the fingers and bringing their hands up to his mouth. He pressed a soft kiss to the mark where the violin string had hit him, the blood just barely scabbed over.

“As I’ve hurt you,” Sherlock said plainly. “You realize that this is insane, yes?”

“Of course,” he said with an unexpected flash of teeth. “But you yourself said that I was impossible and a paradox, and sanity doesn’t really lend itself to either of those things.”

He huffed a laugh. Trust John to surprise him all over again.

Sherlock curled on his side and rested his head on John’s chest, settling closer to him in small, minute increments: shifting his head head so that it lay nearly tucked under John’s chin, twining his leg between John’s. After nearly a moment of careful adjustments, none of which John seemed at all fussed about, he turned slightly so that he was sprawled over John’s relaxed body, head still resting on his chest. His feet were hanging slightly off the bed—he hooked a leg over John’s hip—but it didn’t matter. The contact was nothing short of glorious.

He laid his head over John’s heart, eyes level with his silver-rough scar, and listened to the crimson hymns beating beneath the surface. He imagined flowers blooming in his own chest: veins weaving intricate patterns on petals of thin muscle engorged with blood, sinew for stems and tendons for roots—the flowers would be poppies, maybe (addictive) or foxglove (deadly yet useful)—twining gleaming blood-red around the porcelain bone of his ribs. In his mind’s eye the gruesome bouquet all tied together on the left side of his chest, the stems bound together in heartstrings and the flowers fed by the rhythmic contraction of ventricles. _It’s yours_ , he imagined saying to John— _from the vena cava to the mitral valve to the arteries it is yours._

Instead he said, “It’s probably for the best that we didn’t use the riding crop.”

John mumbled slightly beneath him, just this side of awake and not for long. “What?”

“The riding crop. Can’t have been very sanitary, I’d last used it for an experiment on bruising patterns post-mortem, very interesting results—but, yes, not the most sanitary.”

John’s chest shook underneath him in a silent laughter that became vocal laughter in the span of a few seconds, and as Sherlock’s grin stretched wide and cracked he blamed it on the exhaustion. “That’s—oh, god, Sherlock, that’s not good. For the best. Yes. God help us.” He brushed a kiss against Sherlock’s hairline, and he hummed into it contentedly. “I love you, you madman.”

He hummed into the sheets, nearly half-asleep. A memory came to him, words darkened by sorrow and brightened by the wildfire spark of the cocaine. “Would it have been worth while,” he mumbled, “To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—”

“Yes,” John murmured. “Yes, it would have been. And I hope—god, I hope it was. . .”

“Yes,” he said blearily, “yes, it was—” And then he slept.


	5. Chapter 5

There was no moment of hesitation the next morning. Sherlock blinked awake slowly and every cell in his body was already thrumming with the knowledge that he was in John’s arms: that it was John’s shoulder upon which his head rested drowsily, John’s leg kicked over top of his, John’s arms that circled his waist tightly. Arms that were, in fact, slightly too tense to belong to a sleeping man; John was awake.

Sherlock yawned, unable to stop himself, and he felt rather than heard John’s chuckle rumble on his back. “Morning, love.” A chaste kiss was pressed onto the sleep-warm skin of his shoulder.

“Time’s it?” he asked, drowsy and perfectly content to stay where he was for days. He refused to open his eyes.

“Nearly noon,” John answered. Half asleep still, Sherlock felt a half-hearted attempt at an adrenaline burst before it fizzled out, leaving him even less inclined to move than before, and John was brushing two fingers over the curve of his elbow in a lovely manner.

His _left_ elbow. The arm of which was extended out in an unforgivably lax way, exposing just-fading bruises in the crook of his elbow.

Fear shot through him, real and sharp as the cold steel muzzle of a gun at his temple, and he opened his eyes as he sat up abruptly, yanking John with him. Scrambling to face John, he yanked his arm back and folding them against his chest protectively. “I can explain,” he said quickly, mind racing through various scenarios—blood tests? for a case? accidental? no, don’t be stupid—

“Sherlock,” John said, patiently getting to his knees and sitting back on his heels to face him, crouching half-feral at the foot of the bed, “I woke up two and half hours ago. I saw them then. I’m still here. And they weren’t a surprise.”

“You woke up two and a half hours ago? But why didn’t you—no, wrong question,” Sherlock corrected himself, “ _why_?”

“First of all, I in no way approve of your drug use. Don’t condone it, never will. You quitting for good would make me the happiest man alive. But I’m not stupid either, and guessing that you hadn’t put down the drugs even after a near-fatal overdose not two months ago? It doesn’t take a genius.” John extended a hand toward Sherlock. “Come here.”

“Why?”

“So that I don’t worry that you’re about to jump out of the window like a cornered animal in a blind panic, because that’s what you look like. Sit like a normal person. And you might feel, um, less vulnerable if there’s a sheet covering up your bits. Not that I’m not enjoying the view.”

Sherlock held himself tense for a moment, mulling the words over in his mind before slowly climbing back on the bed and sitting next to John, still wary.

“Thanks,” he said, clearing his throat nervously. “Look, I hate this, I really fucking do. But you’ll only quit if it’s for yourself, Harry taught me that particular lesson years ago when she broke into my liquor cabinet and ruined my new sofa. And there’s a sniper aimed at the flat, and a criminal psychopath has my daughter. Things aren’t ideal for me forcing you to quit, obviously. This is what I ask: tell me. Tell me when, what, and how much.”

“You aren’t going to ask me not to?” Sherlock asked, dumbfounded.

“I want to. But it’s—God, so fucking complicated. I wish you wouldn’t. If you choose to stop right now I will be right by your side for every moment, that I swear to you. But it’s your choice. I don’t kid myself about that, not when the stakes are so high.”

He watched John out of the corner of his eyes, and John just sat there. Let himself be read.

“It’s not so much a physical dependency,” he offered after a moment.

“How long has it been since your last hit?”

“Three days.”

John exhaled through his nose. “That’s. . . better.”

In a low tone, Sherlock said, “I don’t want to be dependent upon it. The thought terrifies me. I—skirt the edges of addiction.”

“That’s a rather risky gamble,” John observed. “Speaking as someone who has attempted to find solace in a bottle of whiskey, let me offer you a piece of completely redundant advice: it’s easier to get sucked in than you think.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do.” John sighed, pinched his nose. “Does anything help you—redirect?”

“Murders,” Sherlock answered, smirking. “Particularly if they occur in a locked room. Particularly clever burglaries, but those are hard to come by. The criminal classes are _so_ dull these days. Serial killers—”

“Genocides?”

John’s tone was mild; it was entirely possible that he didn’t mean it in that way. But then Sherlock observed the slight flush rising from his neck, and now he could see that it began in his breastbone because John was still shirtless and it was _fantastic_ , and he answered seriously. “You.”

“Well, then,” John said thoughtfully. “I’m quite happy to offer my, erm, services.”

Sherlock burst out laughing. “That sounds like a line out of a bad porno.”

“Probably is,” John said, laughing at his side. “Now, come here. Let me offer my services.” He waggled his eyebrows comically, and Sherlock rolled his eyes (it was rather less effective if he was still half-laughing, he discovered) and went where John directed him.

After a moment of adjustments Sherlock found himself half stretched out on the bed, head resting in John’s lap and fingers carding through his hair. It was absolute bliss, and he nuzzled his face into the sheets that covered John’s lap. John giggled above him. “You’re like a feral cat, you know. Half-starved and fiercely independent and secretly a cuddler.”

“I am not a cuddler,” Sherlock grumbled into John’s lap, unwilling to contest the point too fiercely if meant that John’s hands would quit running through his hair.

“Of course not,” John said, obliging and still laughing quietly at the whole thing, and Sherlock wondered how long this could last, the lightness so rarely found in either of their lives. Or, he amended, perhaps this was simply their kind of lightness: playing off the darkness as firelight reflects off obsidian. He rather liked the idea that it was inseparable from the paths of their lives, twisted at times as they had been.

“Wouldn’t you like to get up?” he asked John curiously after a few moments.

He felt John’s shrug, although he couldn’t quite pinpoint how. “I’m pretty content, thanks. And I seriously doubt that we’re going to be leaving 221b today, for. . . reasons.”

“Mmm. I want tea.”

“Make it yourself,” John responded instinctively, still petting Sherlock’s hair.

“Okay,” Sherlock said, grabbing the blue silk dressing gown as he passed through the door but not bothering to put it on. Behind him him he heard John groan and grumble to himself, “Any other bloody day I’d be thrilled if he made the tea,” and Sherlock laughed, the feeling of it electric.

The curtains were shut around the flat, lending a mysterious aura to familiar daylight hours. Scanning his surroundings quickly he saw that nothing had been disturbed, no secrets or surprises waiting, and he proceeded to the kitchen. Making tea took on an unreasonable sense of gravity. Sherlock wanted to make it perfect—John deserved no less than the best.

John stared as he brought the tray back into the bedroom, still reclined lazily against the pillows—and yes, he supposed that it had become a tray at some point, come to think of it. “What’s all this?”

“Tea, the kind Mycroft got us as a gift you love but rarely use because you think it’s too expensive—don’t be ridiculous, John, Mycroft can well afford it and I plan on keeping it around given that it’s your favorite—cream, obviously; honey, not the mass-produced horror that you buy but artisanal, raw, this particular batch is singular varietal honey sourced entirely from wild raspberries; and then I thought you might be peckish given that it’s noon and so I asked Mrs Hudson if she had any bread—she says hello, by the way, and that she plans to invest in earplugs—and so here I have a baguette and butter and raspberry jam because that’s your preference and I plan to put honey on mine—”

John was smiling at him now, a warm, aching thing that spread through his whole face like sunlight, and cut him off before his rambling monologue completely unfrayed and scattered to pieces. “Um, okay. Wonderful, actually. No one’s ever brought me breakfast in bed before, and it’s very—well, I’d say sweet, but—no, scratch that, this _is_ very sweet. Even if you get mad at me for saying that, it’s true. You like honesty—Christ, did you say that Mrs Hudson heard us last night?” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Maybe you can teach me to delete things, like you do. Jesus. But what’s this?”

Sherlock tilted his chin down at the small vase, the tray now settled over John’s lap. “It’s a flower.”

“Got that myself, thanks. How did you get it?”

“Mrs Hudson’s idea,” he admitted grudgingly. “Plucked it out of her flower arrangement.”

“Foxglove? That’s fairly toxic.”

“It’s my favorite flower,” Sherlock said, not looking at John.

“Is it? I can see that. I like it quite a lot myself, digitalin is brilliant for heart failure. Useful stuff, that is, and rather lovely too.” John kept on smiling at him to the point where Sherlock thought he would appear churlish if he kept his chin pointed in the general vicinity of the bathroom, so he dared a quick peek at him. John dipped his chin slightly and raised his eyebrows at Sherlock, still smiling in a manner both querulous and hopeful. “Come back to bed?”

Sherlock faux-sighed as he settled next to John, taking care not to disturb the tray. “If you insist.”

“Of course I do,” John said cheerfully as he handed Sherlock his mug, settled on the tray next to John’s. “You get to make your own toast, I don’t want to mess up the bread-butter-honey ratio.”

“It’s not toast,” he objected, tearing a piece off the baguette. “It hasn’t been _toasted_.”

“Regardless,” John said, taking the bread from his hands as though they were practiced at that sort of casual intimacy, “and I notice you didn’t argue about the proper ratios.”

“It’s not that I thought—” he started before noticing the teasing glint in John’s eyes. “Oh, fine. I’m particular.” He capped off a neat pat of butter and spread it over the hunk of bread with a swift turn of the knife before turning his attention to the dark golden honey, drizzling it over the butter but not the bread. With a deft eye he ascertained that the butter to honey ratio was good—although it was variable, depending on the quality of the butter, type of bread, and origin of the honey—and took a bite, sighing in pleasure. The sweet sunshine taste of the honey, tinted lightly with floral tartness, mingled with the salty cool butter and yeasty bread perfectly.

John had followed this whole procedure with a sharp eye, observing it as though he would be tested later. “God, that was very nearly obscene. I’d happily learn to make you proper toast if you make noises like that when I do.”

“Hmm,” Sherlock hummed. “Try a bite.” He guided the piece of bread to John’s mouth to ensure that he tried a proper bite, and his tongue accidentally lapped at his finger.

“Oh, that is good,” John said with his mouth still full, sighing blissfully as he swallowed.

They sat in a peaceful silence in the dusky room, golden light just seeping out behind the curtains and casting the dust motes in amber as they danced lazily in midair. Sherlock looked around the familiar corners of his rooms, noting the scattered books and pictures amongst the neatly ordered precision of his closet, and marveled at how the room had felt infinite in last night’s darkness and somehow felt entirely new in today’s sunlight. Sipping tea, he felt—content. It was a strange feeling. It felt as though it had settled into cracks in his bones that he hadn’t even known existed and soothed an unacknowledged ache.

Side by side, they ate bread smeared with butter and honey and jam and sipped their tea and were both truly, quietly, spectacularly happy. And yet it had a finite quality—as though it could evaporate from between Sherlock’s desperately grasping fingers—and so he dreaded the end of the meal more than he could say, as though the gentle thud of a mug being placed onto the tray would signal a deadline.

The bread gradually disappeared between the two of them; the tea was drunk with the appropriate fervor. After a moment John sighed, and Sherlock knew: here was the deadline.

“Our lives right now are. . . complicated,” John started, and Sherlock snorted.

“Really, _that’s_ the beginning to your ‘brilliant shag last night but let’s just be friends and by the way I’m not actually gay’ speech? I expected better.”

“Hold it, that’s—actually what you thought I was going to say?” John asked as he turned to face him, incredulous. “For all of your ego, a healthy dose of self-esteem would do you a world of good. That’s not even close to what I was going to say, actually, and I’m trying to decide if I should be insulted.”

“Trying?”

“I’d give it a solid ‘am’ if not for the fact that that was a defense mechanism if I’ve ever seen one. And an, um, rather hasty conclusion given everything. Moving on, yeah?”

“Fine,” he huffed, more curious than he wanted to let on.

“Thanks.” John looked up at his face and nudged his pinky against Sherlock’s. “Now listen to me for a moment. You are my best friend and partner and now something more even. But I—Moriarty has Mary and Mary has my daughter, and I cannot, _cannot_ —”

“The upstairs bedroom,” Sherlock interrupted.

“—what?”

“We can turn the upstairs bedroom into her nursery,” Sherlock explained slowly, aware of the delicacy of his position. He could feel it in the sharp inhale of John’s breath.

“I wasn’t—I didn’t even think I was asking for that,” John said, scrubbing a hand through his hair restlessly. The silver golden strands stuck up slightly in its wake. “That has—implications.”

He didn’t dare lie. “Yes. And you weren’t asking. I offered. Gladly.”

John passed his tongue over his lower lip, bit it for a moment. The creases of his forehead were worn; lovely. “You just offered to have a baby in the flat and me in your bed. As a long term arrangement.”

“Permanent, I would hope,” Sherlock whispered, his voice so small that he wasn’t sure John would catch it even in the hush of the bedroom.

John’s mouth twisted a bit, the corners of it trembling slightly as he inhaled. His eyes shone too bright as he replied. “Well,” he said, his voice thick, “I could never say no to that. Fuck, Sherlock, I—I didn’t think that you would ever want this. Any of this.”

“I do,” Sherlock said, voice low. “I never thought I would either, believe me. I thought I would spend my life chasing the thrill of a clever murder or a hit only to finally end up dead on a pavement somewhere in my late twenties; all I asked of my death was that it be clever. I certainly never planned for—this,” he said, waving an arm elegantly around the room to encompass not only that day but all of the ones since an army doctor had limped into his life. “And I want it. Rather badly, as it turns out.” He laughed, tears building behind his eyes. “I _want_ this. A life with you. And I think I have from the first of it is the thing; I would accept any terms in any imaginable universe to spend my life with you—”

John very deliberately placed the tea tray on the bedside table, and Sherlock stopped talking. “What are you doing?”

He settled himself in front of Sherlock, each leg on either side of Sherlock’s outstretched ones, and cupped Sherlock’s face in between his hands. John held him like he was something precious, fragile. Beautiful. “I’m going to kiss you,” John murmured, a bare inch from his face. A thumb swept moisture away from under his eyes. “And then you’re going to rest, because you haven’t slept well in weeks, and I’m going to sleep next to you, because I haven’t either. And then we’ll get up and eat and kiss and sleep all over again because that’s all we can do for today. Any objections?”

Sherlock shook his head softly, hesitant to disturb the warm cradle of John’s hands framing his cheekbones, and John smiled. “Good.”

John pressed his smile to the corner of Sherlock’s mouth in a lovely almost-kiss, and Sherlock thought, as he nuzzled John’s nose with his own, that he rather liked this plan.

Around eight p.m. they wandered into the kitchen together, John in his boxers and a vest and Sherlock in his silk dressing gown. Still drowsy from sleep, he almost failed to notice the figure sitting quietly on Sherlock’s chair in the sitting room, startling slightly before recognizing the beaky silhouette.

“Jesus,” John said, hand halfway behind his vest, automatically reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. “What the hell, Mycroft. You couldn’t have knocked?”

“Apologies, John. Sherlock.” Mycroft sat in the darkened room with no apparent intention of moving. He frowned and studied his brother, noting the twin notes of exhaustion and worry creeping in. Mycroft hadn’t even moved to watch them as they entered the room.

Sherlock flipped on the light so that he could see better, and Mycroft’s head swiveled in his direction. “Shall I offer my congratulations?”

“Hardly a shining deduction, brother mine,” he said scathingly, crossing over to the mantel and shaking out his curls. Looking in the mirror, he noted with satisfaction that the bruises John had left were already flowering violet and burgundy under his pale skin. “Twenty-four hours late, too. You’re slipping.”

“Hardly.” Mycroft glared at him in the mirror. “There have been a number of crises that have taken up my attention as of late; forgive me for not being the first in line to congratulate you. Mrs Hudson had that dubious honour, I would imagine—I believe I saw earplugs in her shopping bags as I entered the building.”

“I _meant_ that you were twenty four hours late to advise us on the fact that a sniper very clearly wanted us to realize that they had a clear shot at our sitting room.” Sherlock glared and John crossed his arms behind him, leaning against the doorframe.

Mycroft’s pinkie twitched slightly as he smoothed the front of his tie, brushing the criticism aside. “I oversaw the replacement of your windows myself. I knew you wouldn’t come to any harm, and I arrived at the earliest possible convenience.”

“And yet you clearly had a slice of cake previous to your arrival here. Stress eating again, is it? How _is_ the diet going?”

“For the record,” Mycroft spoke over Sherlock, “closed curtains are more effective when one does not engage in,” he coughed, “amorous activities whilst pressed against them.”

They glared at each other, at a stalemate, until John cleared his throat. “Right. Um. So. . . what are the chances that that won’t reach Moriarty?”

Mycroft simply cocked his head and blew out an exasperated breath, aimed at Sherlock. He thought this rather unfair: _he_ hadn’t asked. “Rather miniscule,” he said grudgingly. “One of the _many_ concerns of the past twenty four hours is a discreet little bug that has been found in our CCTV systems. Footage is being redirected to another agency, almost undetected. To fix it will be to leave an inescapably large hole in the security of London for hours; to leave it is unthinkable. Options are being discussed.”

“But you don’t believe it to be from an agency, do you,” Sherlock stated, settling in John’s chair. “You think it’s Moriarty.”

He sighed. “There are certain. . . fingerprints, one might say, that hackers leave. They were remarkably similar to the traces left after the broadcast on New Year’s.”

“All of which means. . .?” John prompted.

Mycroft looked as though something rotten had somehow ended up in his mouth. “They know that we must remove the bug, and that to do so we leave ourselves open to attack. They no doubt will be notified the moment that we begin to actively fix the problem. Imagine how much such information—veritable _hours_ without our normal level of oversight—would sell for. Imagine what they could do with such a gift. There is no way to fix the problem quietly, to my great chagrin, and therefore we must prepare.”

“Jesus,” John breathed out.

“Indeed. And while I’ve no doubt the security of the United Kingdom is at risk, I’ve just as little doubt that you both will be targeted. The sniper was a message. This is a true threat: with access to CCTV they will know exactly where you are up until the moment we remove the bug, at which point they can remove you from Baker Street with fewer electronic witnesses.”

“No.” Sherlock kept his eyes fixed on the mantel, unwilling to entertain Mycroft’s suggestion.

“What?” John asked.

“Sherlock, don’t be a child. It’s the only logical solution.”

“He plans to send us away,” Sherlock told John, baring his teeth at his brother. “No.”

“Not to Antarctica, of course. Merely a lovely cottage in the north of the country. It has a sea view, even. You might think of it as a vacation.”

“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten,” Sherlock snapped, “beach holidays in _February_ are very _in_ right now, perfectly lovely for swimming and sunning.” He snorted. “The answer is still no, in case I didn’t make myself clear.”

“Sherlock,” Mycroft said one last time, patiently, “if you agree to go away without making too much of a fuss, I can guarantee security for your little friends during the blackout. Mrs Hudson. Detective Inspector Lestrade. Molly Hooper.”

Sherlock deliberated, eyes fixed on the skull on the wall behind him. The headphone had slipped on the left side, nearly falling off. He flounced up and righted it before turning around with a sulky glare. “Fine. When?”

“To be decided. We must make preparations; in all likelihood it will take at least a week. You’ll leave twenty four hours prior, of course.” Mycroft smoothed his tie once more.

“Obviously,” Sherlock said, calculating. “Mycroft—large deliveries would look suspicious, yes?”

“Obviously,” he said, mimicking Sherlock’s own arch tone. “And _no_ , leaving the flat would be a catastrophically bad idea at present.”

“Regardless of the fact that they evidently have a larger plan in the works?”

“They have a larger plan precisely because they think, almost certainly incorrectly, that you are an intelligent man and will behave as such,” Mycroft said wearily. “I’m certain that they, unlike you, would be quite happy to dispense with the dramatics and grab you off the street if such an avenue presented itself.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Sherlock sulked. “In that case, if you’d be so kind as to help deliver us some furniture unobtrusively.”

“For the love of God, if you’ve already broken your bed—”

John coughed from the doorway and leveled a positively lethal glare at Mycroft, the sight of which quite warmed Sherlock’s heart. His brother sighed. “What is it that you want?”

“A crib, mattress, rocking chair, changing table—is that—” Sherlock suddenly realized that he might be overstepping and abruptly whirled to face John. John’s face was so open and soft that it took his breath away, breath catching between his lips, and he changed his question. “Is that all of it?”

“All of the bigger stuff, I think. Oh, maybe one of those diaper things. There’ll be a fair number of smaller deliveries; are we fine to have those shipped to the door?” John sounded perfectly natural, as though nothing about any of this was the least bit unusual.

“You’re building a nursery,” Mycroft said slowly.

“Obviously,” Sherlock said, frowning at him. “Have you received a blow to the head recently?”

“No,” Mycroft replied at he stood, his composure in place once more. “Congratulations to both of you. If you would send me a list of supplies over the coming days, it would be my pleasure to organize their arrival.” He gave a slight nod in their direction before exiting the room, the faint footsteps echoing in the stairwell the only remaining trace of him.

 _Something is off_ , Sherlock thought, a slight curl of tension rising in his belly until he looked at John. “Are you sure?” he asked, and John smiled at him so tenderly he thought his heart would finally shatter into so many pieces. Happiness was a nearly unbearable burden, rising gold-warm and heavy in his chest.

“Yes, I—I just can’t believe that this is happening.” He laughed, deep and warm. “It’s surreal, you know?”

“Yes. It’s. . .” He tried to think of the right words to describe this: him and John and a baby, a _family_ , maybe. Shaking his head, he finished his sentence. “Incredible.”

“I don’t mean to push you on this, you know,” John said seriously. “Truly, that you’re even letting me, us, stay after everything is—well, it’s more than I ever would have asked for. Are you okay with this? Be honest.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, rolling the word on his tongue and savoring the mellow sweetness of it. “I want this—rather badly, as it turns out.” He thought of John in his bed, _their_ bed, and how they would maybe fight over the comforter in the small hours of the morning or complain about the other’s cold feet; he thought wonderingly of a fragile life in the room above them, soft inhales and exhales and a quiet warmth curled in the cradle of his arms, and he _wanted_ so much that it made his lungs constrict.

“Hey,” John said softly. “You alright?”

He nodded. “I never thought I could have this.”

“Me either,” John said contemplatively. “I’m not even sure I would have wanted it, once upon a time. And now. . .”

Sherlock took John’s hand carefully and brushed his lips over the knuckles, still slightly bruised. “And now,” he agreed, and John grinned at him, triumph alight on his face despite the continuing softness of his expression. A walking paradox, as ever.

They had fried eggs for supper, made slightly hard when Sherlock refused to stop snogging John long enough for him to move the pan off the stove. In a remarkable show of ingenuity Sherlock dug up chorizo from the fridge and pan-fried it alongside the eggs; they paired it with a Losada that Sherlock swore would complement the spicy sausage. They ate standing up at the kitchen counter, hands brushing each other as they ate, bathed in a comfortable silence.

Retreating to the bedroom, Sherlock found himself exhausted. “Rain check?” he asked tentatively, already sprawled face down on the mattress, and John pressed a kiss on his temple.

“Never a problem, love. And I’d like to take it slow anyway.”

“That’s ridiculous, John. We’ve already had sex and I’ve certainly no objections to doing so again.”

John’s face flushed slightly. “That’s good. Very good, in fact. But nope, we’re still going to take it a bit slow, given the positively earth-shattering speed of our lives at the moment, and anyway you’re half-asleep.”

“Am not,” Sherlock grumbled around a yawn. John clicked the light off and settled behind him in the dark, settling into the curve of his back as though he had always belonged, and contentment welled in Sherlock’s chest.

“Have you ever looked at a bright red light in the reflection of a puddle?” Sherlock asked drowsily. “It should be red through and through, but in the puddle you can see that only the scattered cast-off edges are truly red, and the center is smeared yellow with a bit of white. Like a flame. It’s gorgeous on a rainy evening when the grey clouds are so dark that they’re very nearly violet. You remind me of it.”

“I love you too,” John whispered into the bare skin of his shoulder.


	6. Chapter 6

“Oh, boys,” Mrs Hudson cooed the next morning, nudging the door open with her hip and carrying the tea tray over to the sofa. “Oh, look at you.”

Sherlock quirked the corner of his mouth up at her in a pleased smile from his position, leaning against John’s left side with his legs tucked underneath. At some point John had thrown an arm over his shoulder as he scrolled through the endless lists of baby essentials and pulled him closer, murmuring in his ear about the various pros and cons of different buggies, cribs, mattresses—he’d have guessed himself to be bored stiff but found to his surprise he’d be quite content to never move.

John ducked his head bashfully. “Good morning, Mrs Hudson.”

“Good morning,” she sung, placing breakfast on the table with a slight flourish. “Thought I’d make you a proper fry up today, I didn’t want to interrupt yesterday.” She winked at them. “Really, though, you realize that my sitting room is just underneath your bedroom, Sherlock? Next time you do a scene, John, you might use the upstairs bedroom, or maybe you could try a—”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs Hudson,” Sherlock cut her off. The tips of John’s ears were glowing red.

“Um. Thanks,” John managed, voice quavering between laughter and mortification. “Upstairs bedroom won’t actually—wait, Sherlock, did you _ask_ yet? She’s your landlady.”

“Ours, I hope, and,” he thought back, “no. Mrs Hudson, can John stay on a more permanent basis?”

“Of course, dear,” Mrs Hudson said, pinning them both with an incongruous glare—and steel was suddenly visible beneath her kind smile and violently purple dress. “This is his home as well, so long as he treats you right, and you him.”

John ducked his head once more, a bit of shame just visible in the lines creasing his eyes, and Sherlock nudged their legs together. “Would you mind one more tenant?”

“Hmm?” Mrs Hudson had poured herself a cup of tea and was now sitting down on the edge of the table, looking at them expectantly.

“My, um, my daughter. Could she—? I realize it’s a lot to ask, a baby in the house.” John said hurriedly.

Mrs Hudson clapped her hands together in delight. “A baby! Oh, really? Nothing would make me happier, dear,” she assured John, “so long as I get spoil the little sweetheart rotten.”

“Of course,” John said, the tension on his face softening into a warm smile. “Thank you. Truly, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, dears. Oh, it’s rather exciting, isn’t it? Let me know if I can help with anything,” she said as she stood. “Oh, my boys,” Mrs Hudson repeated as she left, throwing them one last beaming smile before the door shut.

Sherlock smiled at the empty space where she had stood before glancing at the table, frowning. “She nicked my mug.”

“Probably thinks it’s the only one you haven’t experimented in,” John said, laughing quietly. The sofa trembled slightly in time with the shaking of his back.

Sherlock scoffed, mildly affronted, and walked into the kitchen to grab another mug. He emerged a moment later, slightly sheepish. “It appears that I may have used the last of the mugs in an experiment.”

“Oh, god,” John said from the sofa, not looking up as he scrolled down a page. “What for? Please tell me it’s for that ongoing experiment in which you keep yourself alive by ingesting food and liquid on a daily basis.”

“Which is going quite well given that I _am_ , in fact, alive; and no. Mould cultures.”

“Of course,” John sighed. “See, she wasn’t wrong. Get over here and you can nick some of my tea.”

Sherlock swiped a biscuit off the plate Mrs Hudson had left behind and curled up against John’s side, daring to press his lips against his neck, just above the spot where the oatmeal jumper met skin. “Thanks,” he murmured without raising his head.

“Anytime,” John said, raising Sherlock’s hand to press a kiss against his wrist. A light pressure tugged against his fingertips, and then he felt the pull of John’s throat as he swallowed.

“You stole my biscuit,” Sherlock accused, raising his head.

“Yep,” John said, utterly unfazed, half of a Jammy Dodger still in his left hand. “You’re getting some of my tea, it’s only fair. Now come on, let’s go back to bickering about paint colours like a normal couple.”

Breath catching in his throat, Sherlock could only nod. Something gathered inside of his chest, golden like the sunshine just outside their curtains but warmer like tea.

“Alright,” Sherlock said, and by the look John gave him he knew that he had taken a moment too long to reply, but John only quirked the corner of his mouth at him and asked how he felt about patterned wallpaper and the fragile moment glued itself together again, with a bit of light seeping through the cracks.

—

They walked into the sitting room the next day to find a small mountain of cardboard boxes.

John rubbed at his face wearily. “I hadn’t even emailed the list yet. It wasn’t even _finished_.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Sherlock observed, surveying the boxes. “He would have chosen the items based on number of times the page was viewed as well as time spent, factoring our inevitable arguments and my taste into account. Which means—” he wrinkled his nose— “that your daughter will be the unfortunate recipient of that cable-knit monstrosity of a blanket.”

“Bloody terrifying,” John mumbled. “I need tea.” He turned into the kitchen, calling over his shoulder “And don’t think I didn’t see you add that ‘monstrosity of a blanket’ onto the list when you thought I’d gone to the loo.”

Oh. John had been rather more observant than he’d hoped. Still, Sherlock was reasonably confident that his surprise would come across as such. He nudged at a paint can with his foot, a bag laden with tarps, rollers, and paintbrushes beside it. “Mycroft decided the paint color on his own, it seems.”

“What?” John reappeared from the kitchen, looked at the paint sample. “That’s. . . not bad, actually.”

Sherlock glowered, all the more annoyed with his brother for his good taste in paint. “Bastard.”

“Come on, then,” John said. “Might as well do it sooner rather than later, and painting is my favorite part.”

“Is it?” Sherlock inquired, mildly interested.

“Oh, definitely,” John assured him. “You don’t have to, of course, you can always stay down here and put the crib together, I’m sure that’s much better suited to your intellect, even if it is a bit dry. . .”

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll paint.”

Four hours later, lightly speckled in cream-colored paint, Sherlock fixed John with a glare. “This is your favorite part? What other trials must I endure? Vivisection via screwdriver?”

“God no, this part is rubbish,” John said cheerfully, smothering a smug grin.

“But you said—”

“Tom Sawyer,” John said as if it was an explanation, chuckling.

“Who?"

“It’s a—nevermind,” John said, still laughing into his elbow. “Figures you’d’ve deleted it. If in fact you ever knew, I’m not sure that literature has ever been your strong suit.” He ignored Sherlock’s warning glare and threaded fingers through his curls, pulling him down into a kiss.

They broke apart after a moment, and Sherlock was far more inclined to forgive him once he saw the lovely smear of cream paint over John’s right eyebrow. “But paint has surely gotten into my hair,” he protested, mildly put out.

“I’ll help you get it out,” John promised. “In the shower.”

And _oh,_ that was an idea. One that he rapidly put into action once the walls had been painted and John had murmured “I quite like the white at your temples, Grandfather Holmes” and Sherlock had been forced to wait until they were both in the bathroom and lacking clothes to push him up against the wall roughly as retribution. Though come to think of it, it may have been ineffective as a punishment, Sherlock reflected. John hadn’t seemed chastened in the least as Sherlock had pinned his hips against the tile with both hands, down on his knees. Luckily the hot water hadn’t run out before John had rubbed the flecks of paint out of his hair.

They collapsed on the bedsheets, still damp, and John had promptly fallen asleep. Sherlock familiarized himself with the lovely light snores that John apparently emitted when he slept flat on his back, allowing himself a full half hour to observe the way the lamplight glinted off John’s water-darkened hair and the curve of his eyelashes before he slipped silently out of bed. He had a surprise to create.

At seven the next morning he curled in beside John once more, savoring the sleepy warmth of him.

“You’re cold,” John mumbled. “And you smell of. . . adhesive?” Sherlock could feel his muscles stretch and shudder as John tried to wake up. “Sherlock, what did you do?”

“Something good, I promise,” he said, nearly beaming. “You’ll like it.”

“Will I like it before my cup of tea?” John asked. Sherlock gestured to the mug of coffee on the bedside table, steaming lightly.

Swinging his feet out of the bed, John grinned at him. “I’m up, then. I take it I’m allowed to see this surprise now?”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, twining his fingers around the hand that wasn’t clutching a mug of coffee protectively.

“Feels like bloody Christmas morning,” John muttered, a step behind as Sherlock tugged impatiently at his wrist, leading him up the stairs and into the bedroom.

John stopped at the doorway, head raised toward the ceiling, and said nothing; Sherlock began to worry, and then to babble.

“It’s the night sky, you see—of course you do, you’re only slightly an idiot and not a complete one like most people—and it shows the constellations as well, you can see the outlines; and the blue is good, just the right shade of midnight without erring into navy, but I thought it needed a tad bit more color and so you can see that I painted just a bit on top of the wallpaper, not too noticeable but you can see hints of vermillion and violet and sapphire and goldenrod now, and I won’t lie, I added a bit of silver paint to the constellations after I tinkered slightly with the formula so that it will glow in the dark, your daughter should be able to see the constellations at night and in the—what?”

“You painted the night sky on the nursery ceiling?” John asked slowly, mug of coffee held between both hands, gaze still slowly roving over the ceiling.

“Yes,” Sherlock said, “although I didn’t _paint_ paint it, I merely accentuated features that should have been there in the first place. Is it—did I do something wrong?”

“No, no you didn’t,” John said, eyes shining. “Come here.”

Sherlock went, obedient, and John gripped him in a tight hug and refused to let go. A muffled voice reached his ears from where it originated, somewhere near his collarbone. “Fuck, Sherlock. I don’t—I honestly don’t know how I didn’t see it.”

“I didn’t want you to,” Sherlock said to John’s golden hair, slightly bitter.

“Nope,” John said, lips brushing Sherlock’s chest through the fabric of his vest. “Sorry, not believing you. But this I swear to you—” and at this he pulled back, looked directly at Sherlock with slightly reddened eyes— “I will. From now on, I will look.”

John wiped at his nose roughly, as though angry at his sorrow, and Sherlock tugged lightly at the bottom of his vest where it had rucked up and exposed a sliver of his hipbone. “But this is okay?”

“More than,” John promised, voice slightly fragile. “More than, love. I love you.”

“I’d like to learn the constellations,” Sherlock whispered. “Ever since—”

“I’ll teach you,” John vowed. “Whether it’s on the ceiling of the nursery or somewhere miles away from civilization where we can see every star in the sky. I’ll teach you. But for now,” he trailed his hand down Sherlock’s forearm to tangle their fingers together, “let’s set up as much as we can today.”

It was less work than Sherlock had imagined, given the dubious joys of painting the previous day. As John put the crib and assorted furniture together, he unpacked the various boxes.

“John?” he said, holding up a battered copy of _The Hobbit_. “Did this used to be yours?”

John came over, examined the book closely. “That’s—yes, that was mine. Favorite book as a child. How—?”

“Mycroft. Of course he would,” Sherlock growled. “Which means that somewhere in here, we’ll find—”

He went over to the corner and opened one of the lighter boxes, slitting the tape as though it had done him a personal wrong. Sherlock held up, slightly sheepishly, a worn stuffed animal.

“A bee?” John asked, beginning to smile. “Really?”

“Shut up,” Sherlock groused, running a practiced hand over the faded yellow and black stripes, feeling the familiar groves where his childish fingers had worn away at the softness. “It was a gift.”

“Ah, yes,” John said, mouth twitching, refraining from commenting on the fact that the toy was obviously well-loved.

“She can have it now,” Sherlock said, placing it on top of the boxes as though it was of no concern.

John straightened the bee so that it sat upright. “Thanks. What other treasures will the boxes hold, d’you suppose?”

Sherlock shrugged. “We’ll find out.”

In the end, it took just over eight hours to set up the nursery. Sherlock stepped back and examined the room in the golden light of late afternoon, satisfied. Gauzy white curtains, just enough to satisfy John’s security concerns, fluttered over the window, just a touch lighter than the cream of the walls; the simple walnut crib matched John’s old dresser and the new changing table well. Somehow Mycroft had found childhood relics from the both of them: battered and beloved books lined the bookshelf, along with newer books on parenting, and John’s old baby blanket graced the foot of the bed, on top of the cable knit one that Sherlock had professed to dislike. An auburn persian rug rested on the hardwood floor, and Sherlock thought wonderingly that John’s daughter might learn to crawl on that very rug.

It all felt so very _real_ in a way that it hadn’t before, a view that Sherlock could see mirrored in the fierce joy and fear on John’s face as they looked at each other. They reached for each other wordlessly, fumbled down the stairs and into bed with a desperation that surprised both of them. After, as their hands skimmed restlessly along sweat-sheened skin, reluctant to break contact, John spoke.

“I don’t know why I’m thinking about this,” he said, an arm stroking lazily down Sherlock’s back. “I don’t often. You know how it is. But there was this one day in Afghanistan—well, honestly, there were a lot of days like this, when everything just went to hell. I would go on patrol with my men, not enough water and nerves stretched thin and the sun practically a physical weight as much as your packs, and then I’d get to base and—well, it would be different every night. Some nights it would be quiet and we’d play cards and gamble quietly and get drunk if we could manage. . . beer never tasted so good anywhere else in the world as in Afghanistan. But. There were also nights when I’d get back and be called immediately to surgery, patrol be damned.”

Sherlock listened intently. John rarely spoke about the war, and he sifted through the words as though each was a precious gem, filing them away for safekeeping in his mind palace. But for now, he listened with every cell of his body.

“And so I’d go and scrub up and be in surgery all night too, and—God, the injuries. You can’t see them after a while; there are just too many. If you connect it all together, the injury to the person to the IED or firefight or militant that caused it, you’d go mad. So I didn’t. It became very—dispassionate, I think—after a while. I’d be under, you know, shitty fluorescent lights with horrifically limited supplies, trying to save soldiers’ limbs and lives both. And it wasn’t like I was performing open heart surgery in a tent in the desert but that didn’t mean the conditions were good. I mean, sometimes mortars would shake the ground. And I got used to this. I—had to, really.

“But there was this one night, and—I, I’d been on a two day patrol and came back to find that there had been an attack on a different patrol a ways east of ours, and the casualties—god. I couldn’t think about it at the time, of course. Just kept carrying on in surgery. Needs must. But twelve hours later. . . the men were either recovering or dead and it was three in the morning. And I know, I know should have gone to sleep, obviously, but I—couldn’t. The scent of blood catches in your nose after a while; you can’t close your eyes without seeing burnt flesh. I’d been awake for easily—god, a solid day at that point, and it didn’t matter.

“We weren’t supposed to, really. But I grabbed the half-arsed blanket off my cot along with my coat and sat outside. Not far, you understand. But anyway, I sat out in the desert facing away from the light of the base and stared up at the stars for hours, and god help me, they were beautiful. Spectacular. And at first, I was—overwhelmed. And angry, too, because they were so distant and so beautiful and so cold, and what did they care that the man who’d beat me at cards the night before had bled out on my operating table? I was furious at the waste, at the pointlessness of it all. But I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the stars. Lying on my back in the sand, I felt like I was going to spin off the face of the earth and fall straight into the milky way.

“I didn’t come to any sort of conclusion that night. But. . . even as I was scared and furious and grieving, there was a sort of comfort to be found there—in that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, and that space was infinite, and so on. It didn’t make me feel better, to know that I was so expendable. But—it still helped. I don’t know why,” John finished, staring up at the ceiling as though he could see the painted constellations a floor above them. “An odd moment of light. Have you ever. . .?”

Sherlock tilted his head slightly. “I think so.”

John raised an eyebrow, a silent request for more.

“It happened while I was. . . away,” Sherlock said reluctantly.

“I’ve been something of a complete arse about that,” John said, curling in on himself unconsciously. “But I’m not—I’m not angry. Or I am, maybe, but I understand now, I think. And I’m, I’m realizing that there are two years of your life that I know absolutely nothing about, apart from what I can glean from your injuries. I’d like to know. Not all at once, maybe, but if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hear.”

John’s eyes were open, sincere; gravity dragged at his tone. “Alright,” Sherlock said, biting his lower lip and staring at his hand in John’s.

“You know at least the basics of _why_ I faked my own death. The specifics were more complex, and changed with every new target, but I had my mission: to take apart Moriarty’s network. And because the strategically important leaders within a crime syndicate are less than agreeable about reforming their life choices, this often was a, shall we say, harsh task. I would extract intelligence by all necessary means and then—well. You were a soldier, and so you understand this—even if you don’t like it, even if you don’t agree with it. And I didn’t either, but it was my only means home. These people were not innocents. So I did it anyway.

“A few weeks in I tracked down Pyotr Mikhailov to Seattle, in the States. He was a renowned assassin; I found out that he had been placed a block away from Baker Street during Moriarty’s game. He was a central figure in a cartel that trafficked in both heroin and humans. I looked for—fracture points, I suppose—when I was away, so as to splinter the web with the least amount of exertion. Mikhailov’s death would fracture ties between two infighting factions, pitting them against each other so that they would be of no use to the remainder of Moriarty’s network.

“It seemed so simple then. I thought that I’d be gone a few months at most. But it had already begun to take a toll on me, my new line of work: I was paranoid, often rightfully, and still grieving. So I’d not let myself truly look around until I arrived in Seattle.

“Maybe it’s because it was similar to London, at least in terms of the climate. Perpetual grey skies and mildly damp weather. But anyway, I arrived and I found Mikhailov and I tracked him, searching for an opportunity. He was smart; stuck to crowds or areas with no overhead visibility. I knew it would have to be a close-range hit, and finally just before dawn we met in an alleyway. Guns are frightfully easy to get in the States, and I had a silencer. It was quick, quiet as far as these things go, but I left behind a body in a gritty narrow back alley and got into the rental car and drove.

“You might think that a getaway would be quick, like the movies. But you still have to obey traffic laws if you don’t want to get pulled over for something so idiotic as running a red after committing murder, you still have to stick to the speed limits. So I got in the car and took a roundabout route through the suburban outskirts of the city and then got on the nearest interstate and drove, hoping to lose anyone that might have been on my trail. Mikhailov had friends—well, I say friends.

“Seattle’s a metropolitan area; lots of interstates combine and so I switched onto one heading east on a whim, and it took me down into a small tunnel. And it was absolutely inexplicable, but the sun had just come up through the haze and there was an opening in the ceiling of the tunnel, just a few feet across, and through it crept these vines. I’d spent weeks barely able to notice the most basic details around me that didn’t relate to my immediate survival, and somehow this, these overgrown lush vines brimming with ruby berries creeping into a tunnel lined with gleaming white subway tile—somehow this was indelibly printed on my brain. It still is.

“And I came out of the tunnel and suddenly it felt as though the entire world had revealed itself to me in almost painful detail. I got off the freeway, turned so that I was driving back into Seattle, skimming just on top of the water and climbing over a hill to reveal the city once more, painfully clear in the frigid morning air, and I could see everything. Every last detail, from the leaves on the trees to the number of windows on a high rise. And it was—gorgeous, painfully so. I could see the way the city was newer than London and yet grittier and more colorful, unexpectedly, and how the land surrounding it looked like it was constantly fighting for dominance: deep green vines wound over worn concrete; moss sprung from miniscule cracks in the pavement. I could see the way that the horizon was framed by sharp new mountains on every side, and the way that it was a golden autumn and not a ruby one, and the way that the geometric details of the buildings almost made them look like pixels from far away. And I could see it all, every jagged edge of the world, and I’d just killed a man and my last meal had been the cold black coffee sitting in my cupholder and I hadn’t slept in days and Americans drive on the wrong side of the road, of course—it felt like the entire world had been reversed. Everything was upside down and too bright and too much, but god, it was nothing short of stunning for that moment. It felt like—” and Sherlock cut himself off abruptly, because he had been about to say: _it felt like falling, like flying_.

“It wasn’t happiness,” he said carefully. “But I felt so— _alive_ , in that moment.”

John settled on his side, wrapped an arm around his chest. “An odd moment of peace in the darkness, maybe,” he suggested.

“Yes,” Sherlock said slowly, tasting the idea on his tongue, bittersweet and mellow. “I think—maybe. Odd, that it should be so.”

John nodded slightly, wrapping a foot over Sherlock’s calf. They sat in silence as the light deepened and gradually shaded into dusk, disinclined to move.

“It reminds me of right now,” John said, a while later. “Incongruous, but somehow right.”

“I hope we aren’t so fleeting,” Sherlock murmured, for he felt it too: the sense of a knife overhead, perceptible only by the subtle distortions of the air currents.

“We aren’t,” John said, defiantly. “We _aren’t_.”

Nodding, Sherlock stared at the cracks in the plaster ceiling before reluctantly levering himself to a sitting position. “Mrs Hudson is likely expecting us for tea. Said she had something to give us?”

“Something for the baby, more like,” John said, following his lead and reaching for his pants, “but yes.”

“We’re second class now,” Sherlock complained with a bit of laughter in his tone, zipping up his trousers and pulling on his shirt.

“And rightly so. Here—” and John walked over to Sherlock and began doing up the buttons of his shirt, starting from the bottom. He kept his hands at his side, afraid of interfering as a wave of tenderness hit him.

“Thanks,” he said as John deftly slipped the last button through the hole.

“Of course,” John replied, pulling on a jumper. “Now, Mrs Hudson?”

Mrs Hudson welcomed them with freshly baked biscuits and tea. “Hello, boys. And how is the room going?”

“Nearly done,” Sherlock said.

“Ooh, that’s exciting! You must be so happy, John dear.”

Sherlock winced slightly, but John stood tall. “You know what,” he said, nudging his foot against Sherlock’s subtly, “I am.”

“Of course I want to see the little dear’s room right away, but I’ve got a little something for you first. Put it down in 221c so that Sherlock wouldn’t find it immediately,” Mrs Hudson explained conspiratorially. “Would you possibly carry it up for me?”

“Of course, Mrs Hudson,” John said.“You know you didn’t have to.”

“Nonsense,” she said, very nearly snapping her tea towel at him. “Now, I hope you like it, of course.”

“I’m certain we will,” Sherlock said. He just caught John’s look of approval at his diplomacy as they walked into the hallway.

Mrs Hudson hummed. “Oh dear, where’d that old key go. . . here it is.” Fumbling with the keys, she nearly dropped them. She unlocked the door with a metallic click, and the three of them entered the room before stopping dead.

In the middle of 221c lay a bomb.

“Nobody move,” Sherlock commanded immediately, ice rushing through his veins, as John let slip a soft curse. From the doorway he analyzed what he could see of the bomb: no visible timer, no tripwire, no reason to assume that it would go off and equally no reason to assume that it wouldn’t. In the corner of the room he vaguely noticed a beautiful old rocking chair, no doubt Mrs Hudson’s gift.

“Quietly,” John said, “ _slowly_ , move out of the room and out of the house. Now.”

Mrs Hudson, made of sterner stuff than even Sherlock had ever given her credit for, backed away immediately; John tugged oh-so-lightly at Sherlock’s sleeve. “I said _now_.”

“It’s not going to go off,” Sherlock murmured, eyes fixed on the bomb, roving over it. “It’s only a message.”

“Sure about that, are you? I’m not. Now _move_.”

Finally, Sherlock did so. The ground felt unsteady beneath his feet as they went into the street, the fresh air odd on his skin after days inside. “Cover,” Sherlock said, snapping back a bit, “we need to find cover. That alley.”

In the alleyway, Sherlock fumbled at his phone with shaking fingers. _Bomb in 221c. SH_

Mycroft texted back immediately. _Two cars will arrive shortly, one for yourselves and the other for Mrs Hudson. MH_

_Thank you. SH_

“It’s not going to go off,” he said, pacing frantically behind the dumpster, careful to stay out of view up any bystanders. “If they wanted to kill us they could have at any time, _that_ was the message, and so we’re not in immediate danger—well, actually, we are—but this isn’t _immediate_ per se, it’s only meant to destabilize us and it’s _working_ —”

The cold slipped under his knuckles in a sharp ache. “Sherlock,” John warned, catching him by the forearm. He stumbled at the strength of John’s hold and nearly fell against the wall, suddenly aware that the alley was beginning to spin around him. “Calm down. Breathe. And for fuck’s sake, stop walking in circles.”

“But I don’t know—” he protested weakly, his shirt catching on the rough brick as he rested his weight against the wall.

“Yes you do. You know that this is a message that we aren’t secure. Message received and taken to heart: we’re leaving for somewhere safer.”

Sherlock scanned the perimeter from force of habit, noted that the streetlamps had come on. “But the nursery,” he protested, strangely unwilling to leave it.

“Will be here when we get back,” John finished. “And we will be, Sherlock.”

Straightening his back, Sherlock found that air was more easily come by. “Of course,” he said, regretting his momentary loss of composure. “Mrs Hudson, are you alright?”

She nodded from off to the side. “I always did like an exciting life,” Mrs Hudson said, shaken and yet relentlessly optimistic, and Sherlock adored her in that moment: her ability to survive and adapt and move on and _love_.

Turning to face her, Sherlock braced his hands against her forearms. “I’m sorry,” he said. This was why he didn’t apologize—the words either came out weak as water or burned a hole through his chest on the way out, and it bloody seared. “I’m so sorry.”

Brushing this aside with a shake of her head, she reminded him sharply, “It’s not your fault that a psychopath wants to play games with you, dear. And I’ll be damned if I let you blame yourself for this.”

“You’ll have to leave Baker Street,” Sherlock said relentlessly. “Until this game is done. You’ll need protection, because he knows that I care about you, and—I can’t stop it. Any of it.”

A sleek black car pulled up at the entrance to the alley; the door opened to reveal Mycroft. Marginally relieved, Sherlock nodded at him over Mrs Hudson’s shoulder. “Sherlock,” she said gently, and that was all she said. It was enough. After a moment Sherlock nodded, and Mrs Hudson walked toward the car and got in with dignity.

John pressed up against Sherlock’s side, and the quiet stability of John was what first informed Sherlock that he was trembling. “It’s all right, love,” John said quietly. “It’s going to be okay.”

Sherlock shook his head as Mycroft drew near, but didn’t respond.

“Brother mine,” he greeted Mycroft, “we both know that, given the circumstances, this is less an actual threat than an implied one. Must we be sentenced to a safehouse for an indeterminate period of time?”

Mycroft looked exhausted, worse even than last they’d met; for all that his chin jutted out arrogantly per usual the circles beneath his eyes had deepened. He carried an indefinable aura of weariness about him. “For the last time, _no_ , you are not to stay here when your security has been so thoroughly compromised. You remember our agreement.”

Closing his eyes in resignation, Sherlock asked “Can we at least gather personal effects?”

“Waiting in your temporary home,” Mycroft said.

“Fine.”

“Good. I’ll be in touch,” he said.

“Keep me informed,” Sherlock said as they reached the end of the alley and prepared to enter separate cars.

“Obviously.” Mycroft hesitated for the barest second, just enough to pique Sherlock’s interest, before nodding briefly and stepping into his own car.

“Come on,” John murmured, tugging Sherlock towards their car. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: Oh my god, I messed up and made the wrong literary reference in this chapter. (Quite possibly this shouldn't embarrass me as much as it does.) It's fixed now, though!


	7. Chapter 7

The drive was long, made longer by the fact that the driver backtracked, drove in circles so as to shake off anyone tailing them; Sherlock wondered blurrily if that will be enough given that they only changed cars once. But he was beyond caring, truthfully, slumped in the backseat against the solid warmth of John and blearily counting the kilometers as they passed by.

His internal clock told Sherlock that they’d pulled up at the cottage just after one in the morning. At the cessation of the soothing motion John tensed into wakefulness, murmuring a groggy “Have we arrived?” as he remembered the events of the previous few hours.

“Yes,” Sherlock answered, hushed in the darkness. No bags to unload—they opened the car door and accepted the key that the driver handed them silently before walking toward the darkened shadow of the small cottage. Behind them Sherlock felt the low hum of the engine recede as the car drove away.

John unlocked the door and pushed it open to reveal a rather ordinary home, the most significant feature of which was the long windows that overlooked the beach. The room shone with the silver moonlight, amplified by the light playing off the waves. Neither of them bothered to turn a light on.

“I’m for bed,” John announced. “Don’t suppose you know where the bedroom is?”

“Never been here before, that would rather negate the point of a safehouse,” Sherlock said, and in the same breath added “but it’s the second door on the left down that hallway.”

John chuckled; still a bit sleepy, still a bit tense. “Of course. Care to join me?”

“Certainly, but I feel I ought to remind you of the security measures which my brother has certainly littered the cottage with, which will quite easily pick up on certain sounds and give Mycroft reason to blackmail me for _ages_.”

“Just sleeping,” John promised, his smile a bit more genuine. “Come on.”

Sherlock woke at dawn the next morning, curled into John’s side. The gold of John’s hair was more pronounced in the sunlight, and he admired it—not that he didn’t love the silver, of course, quite the opposite—but he thought wistfully of the many ways in which John was complex and paradoxical and constantly surprising him. Sherlock knew himself, the immutable laws that governed his life: he wondered when John would grow tired of them. Tired of the sameness, angry at the impulsive way in which he threw himself into danger—so many ways it could go wrong, really; the sheer number of possibilities boggled the mind.

And yet John was still here, with an arm tucked snugly over his back as though he actually wanted to be close to Sherlock, and he still didn’t know quite what to make of that.

He eased himself from under John’s arm gently so as not to wake him—when had he ever thought of such a thing?—and dressed himself, grudgingly approving of Mycroft’s choices. The wardrobe contained well-fitted suits and wool jumpers with plaid shirts; he padded through the house in the pale morning light and discovered John’s preferred brand of tea in the cabinet and a box of nicotine patches behind the mirror in the bathroom. Frowning at the patches, he decided to fix a cup of tea.

A quick perusal of the bookshelf revealed a well-known book on an infant’s first year. Despite the criticism against the book that Sherlock had discovered in his research, he picked it up and started to read as he sipped his tea.  Half an hour later he tossed it on the sofa, too agitated to continue reading. Pacing frenetically across the hardwood, steps no less urgent for the care with which he took so as to not disturb John, he yanked open the mirror cabinet in the bathroom and slapped two patches haphazardly onto the pale skin of his forearm.

Why, after nearly a week without the drugs, was this the day that his self-control had decided to break?

Stimulation would help, he decided. Or perhaps mindfulness, that dreadful buzzword that, for all of its well-meaningness, made him want to laugh scornfully at the various people who had suggested it. They wanted to teach him, Sherlock Holmes, to be mindful. A caustic laugh caught in his throat, but he knew the stakes: baby book at his side, Sherlock walked out to the beach.

It was a striking morning. Dark clouds covered the sky, but golden light shone through nonetheless, cracks in the darkness. The hypnotic motion of the ocean belied its monstrous strength, a thought that comforted Sherlock oddly as he settled on a rock to watch the peculiar pale green waves. He thought fancifully of sea creatures; krakens and sea nymphs and sirens.

_I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each._

_I do not think that they will sing to me._

Wind in his hair, sand flitting against his trouser legs in the breeze, the slight hum of nicotine in his veins: they were distractions. He tried to skitter along the quicksand edge of the sensations and nearly missed the warm body settling next to his on the rock.

“Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

John’s voice was slightly amused, no doubt aware of the incongruity of the scene. Suddenly aware that the wind was, after all, quite brisk, and that it was exactly the temperature one would expect of a February morning, Sherlock bristled instinctively against his best efforts. “It’s dull.”

“The country? Never thought you’d be one for it,” John said, tea clutched protectively in between his hands. “Can’t imagine you anywhere but London, truthfully.”

“Someday, I want to have a hive of bees,” Sherlock said quietly, without taking his eyes off the ocean. “But you’re quite right; I detest the country. Perhaps I can have an urban apiary.”

“On the rooftop of 221b,” John said. “Mrs Hudson will be thrilled.”

Sherlock only shrugged dismissively. “I’ll give her plenty of honey, of course. And they’re quite beneficial to the environment, of course.”

John only laughed, and they lapsed into silence. Their knees touched lightly.

“So,” John said after a time, “what’s going on in that head of yours? You’re even farther locked inside it than usual.”

Responding with a noncommittal hum, he hoped that would be enough to end the matter. But John was persistent, and nudged him gently. “No, really. I’ve always been curious, and now we’ve got time. It will take at least forty minutes for hypothermia to set in, by my estimate.”

Unexpectedly, Sherlock let out a low breath of laughter. “You can’t imagine, I think. Don’t take that as an insult: that’s a good thing. You’re normal, or maybe not normal but close enough to resemble it without being tedious.”

“And how will you know if you don’t try explaining?” John asked mildly. “Just—talk to me. Let me know what’s going on. How do you see the world, anyway?”

John’s eyebrows have raised slightly at the middle, highlighting the creases of his wrinkles, and Sherlock loves them—loves _him_ , rather, in all likelihood. For this reason and no other, he decided to answer.

“You might be normal, but I’m—not. Can’t quite get there. My frame of reference is off, of course, can’t know what you’ve never had, but. . . I’m getting off track.” Taking a deep breath, he started over. “I think the world is—sharper, maybe—for me. Sometimes it’s softer and duller and I can see how people bear it, but most of the time it’s—crystallized. That’s the only way I know to describe it: lines are sharper, lights brighter, scents _more_. It’s overwhelming at times.”

“Okay.” John nodded once, digesting this. “Sensory issues, almost certainly.”

“Textbook, if in fact there _was_ a textbook. It sounds so inconsequential, put into words,” he admitted grudgingly, “I can’t get to the essence of it, but imagine. . . imagine sitting on the tube. It’s fine for you; maybe a bit difficult after the war but still, nothing that distressed you. But for me—well. The number of stairs are always uneven—why the people who build such things can’t make all of the stairs the same number of steps, I’ll never understand—and then the escalator down, the handrail is slightly faster than the stairs, it will make it to the bottom of the stairs three and a half seconds before the matching step will. The lights are fluorescent, harsh; one of them invariably flickers and it’s _unbearable_ , can’t ignore it. The people who designed the cars themselves surely had a contest to decide on the worst possible upholstery because it’s _horrific_ , very nearly a crime against humanity what with its asymmetrical splotches and synthetic feel, and all of this doesn’t even take the _people_ into account. Petty people with their petty problems and luridly colored clothing and someone will wear too much perfume and someone else will invariably smell of urine and then everyone _talks_ and if they don’t then they _rustle_ and _breathe_ and do you see, now? Analyzing people helps because it reduces the sheer volume of the noise. Drugs helped more.”

And there, _there_ is the crux of the problem, and John understood immediately. “It’s a danger night.”

“Morning, rather,” Sherlock said, unwilling to relinquish even the slightest bit of control, “but. . .”

“You haven’t, yet,” John stated, a question all the same.

“Of course not. It’s not—it _isn’t_ a physical dependency.”

John bit his lip. “There are physical components to this, which you ought to know well. Regardless. What do you plan to do? And how can I help?”

Sherlock snuck a look over at his friend for the first time in several moments, and upon finding no anger on his face felt an immense gratitude overwhelm him.

“I’m going to quit,” he said quietly. “Now.”

Because there was, for the first time, a reason that mattered; that made him look around the too-clear too-bright world and think, _it’s actually a rather beautiful thing, this life._

He flipped up the bottom of his coat and carefully pulled out a false seam to reveal a worn bag of cocaine, flattened in a line so as to fit without being noticeable. Sherlock’s hands trembled as he held it in his grasp. It would be so easy. So fucking easy.

 _No_ , he reminded himself. This must end, now.

And with that he stood up and walked several paces away before kneeling at the ground. John followed behind him, keenly aware but not suspicious, and as Sherlock began to dig in the sand with his hands he vocalized a small “oh” of realization.

He dropped it in the hole ignominiously—no reason to mourn something so virulently self-destructive—and kicked sand over the bag with his foot. John joined in, scuffing the sand with the side of his shoes.

Sherlock turned around and walked to the cottage without looking back. He knew that within moments, perhaps even by now, the bag would be lost to him in the ever-changing sand. Good riddance. And even though that was a lie—well, maybe someday it wouldn’t be.

Sitting silently at the counter, John made him a cup of tea. As he clutched it in his hands he noted the heat of it, searing after the chill outside.

“I’m proud of you,” John said as he put the kettle on again, foregoing eye contact to avoid awkwardness. “It sounds—God, not nearly enough. But. I am. And I love you.”

“My bedside drawer,” Sherlock responded. “That’s where all the last of it is.”

John sniffed, almost angrily. “Right where anyone would see it, if only they looked.” But instead of chastising him, John only placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it. And thank you. For trusting me.”

“I always do,” Sherlock said simply, watching his breath ripple across the hot surface of the tea and disturb the gentle curls of steam.

Outside it began to rain; the dark clouds shaded into violet at the edges as the rain released itself from the clouds, a burden too heavy to bear. It felt like a sort of absolution, the warmth of tea cupped between his hands and John’s fingers curled just on the edge of his shoulder lightly and the tender rage of the elements outside. The lights were off, the kettle emitting a sort of low hiss: he thought that his words might be tamped down into the ground as though by raindrops and spoke quietly.

“I don’t understand you. God knows I’ve tried, but you always defy expectations; you are a good man and yet you went to war, you saved people and killed them. A doctor and a soldier and a husband and yet you crave my particular brand of adrenaline, I think, and I—I don’t understand it. How you can be both gentle and furious at once; how you can both love me and hate me, sometimes. You’re a walking paradox. It’s brilliant, fantastic, incredible—please do not misunderstand me. But I’m not. I ricochet between highs and lows but I am a constant, in the most inconsistent of ways: I will always be a sociopath, I will always crave danger, I will always be an addict. And I don’t understand how you, with all of your complexity, will not tire of it. Of me.”

Sherlock refused to shut his eyes and blind himself. Instead, he fixed his gaze on a small vase of marigolds in the window. Juxtaposed against the dark sky and jade waves, the orange of the flowers was striking. He wondered dimly who had put them there, and how they hadn’t yet wilted.

John’s hand on his shoulder was still, like his finger the moment before he pulled the trigger. After seven seconds, he exhaled; after nine, he spoke. “Don’t know where to begin with that, really, so I’ll start with the easiest and work my way up. You’re not a sociopath, and don’t even try to tell me otherwise. Completely inaccurate on so many levels. You crave danger—as you pointed out, this time with some accuracy, so do I. We’re well-matched, actually, in a very _worrying_ sort of way. Third: I won’t try to deny that it will be difficult at times, but you have made a commitment to quitting the drugs. I believe you, I support you; and while I in no way think that you’re doing it solely for me, and rather hope that you aren’t, I hope that I can provide certain. . . well, that I can help.”

At this point John came around to his side and braced his elbows on the wooden table. If Sherlock looked away from the marigolds he would be able to see John’s face in profile, rumpled and concerned and altogether lovely. His hair was more silver in the grey light of the rain, a fact which made Sherlock’s heart ache just the slightest bit. In his navy blue jumper and typical steadfastness he seemed ready to weather the storm, while Sherlock sat in his chilled silk-blend button down with the sleeves rolled up and trembled.

“And I’m sorry,” John continued. The apology took Sherlock by surprise; a bit of tea scalded his hand as he straightened abruptly.

“What _for_?”

“You just said that I both hate you and love you. And god, I wish that I could just—I wish it wasn’t true. But—” John clenched a fist at his side; Sherlock could tell by just the movements in his shoulder alone and he loved him, he loved him, he loved him, even as his chest constricted at what was yet to come— “after you left, and after Mary, and just—the messes we’ve found ourselves in, my god. All I can tell you is that I have loved you all this time, even as I was furious and scared and grieving, and that I love you now and will love you for the rest of my life. And I can tell you this, as well: you deserve better than me. So very much better, and I, I would understand if—”

“Don’t say it,” Sherlock interrupted, angry. “Don’t say that, it’s perfectly _horrific_.” He took a deep breathe, reined in the fear that gripped tightly woven ropes around his limbs. “Tell me if this is not good, because I can’t always judge it for myself even if I care to try. We’re both imperfect, obviously, so let’s—stop. Stop comparing, stop blaming. We’ve hurt each other too much to bear; we can either leave or begin again.”

He looked into John’s eyes then, approximately three shades more blue and slightly more brown than the ocean out the window. “I know which option I prefer.”

John exhaled shakily. “It’s too much to ask.”

“It’s not, though.”

“Well,” John said, dropping his head as though in prayer and letting out a strangled half-laugh. “Well, then. I know my choice. But you—”

“—have also made mine,” Sherlock said with finality.

In the small, dim kitchen, Sherlock lifted his head and turned to look directly at John. “Hello,” he said quietly. Twining their fingers together: John’s dexterous, competent fingers between his own, eliminating the gaps. “You are the only person I have ever chosen. You are my colleague and my friend and my partner, and I chose you. And I will continue to do so for as long as I live. Is that enough?”

“Um,” John said eloquently, surreptitiously passing a hand beneath his eyes. “Yes, I rather think it is. Let me see, then. You saved my life, more than I think you ever realized, brilliant as you are. You _changed_ my life, when I hated it and everyone and myself. I would die for you gladly. And I love you. So much that it, quite frankly, terrifies me.”

Their breath mingled in the hushed air of the cottage, but neither moved. Somehow this moment had taken on a strange significance, a reverence that one expected to find at weddings and cathedrals but which Sherlock had only ever found in gritty blood-stained back alleys and chemistry labs and 221b as John’s fingers brushed oh so carefully through his hair.

“So what now?” Sherlock asked in a whisper, afraid that the moment would pass.

“Now,” John said, pushing a lock of hair off of his forehead tenderly, “we get through this. We win, or maybe we just survive but that means that we’ve won just as much, and we go back to 221b. The both of us, together.”

“And one,” Sherlock said.

“And one,” John agreed, and by the look on his face he was thinking of a star-speckled nursery and a crib. “We have so much to fight for.”

“But for now, we wait.”

Shrugging, John nodded his assent. “Nothing for it.” He had clasped his hands together on the table, a fact which Sherlock found—not irritating, quite, but less than ideal. Reaching out, he swiped at the side of John’s wrist, catlike, and John obeyed his unspoken request and placed his hand on top of Sherlock’s. He tapped a finger lightly on Sherlock’s pinkie finger as he spoke. “In the meantime, I’ve been told that I make an excellent fry up.”

Sherlock looked at him, at the serious earnestness of his face and the smile playing on his lips, and laughed. “You make a terrible fry up. You’re the reason Mrs Hudson cooks for us so frequently.”

“I’m relatively certain that she cooks for us because we have body parts in our fridge rather than edible food.”

“Technically speaking—”

“Nope,” John cut him off. “Technicalities are not something we’re going to discuss, what with the topic at hand. Now, how about I make us soldiers and toast?”

“Okay,” Sherlock said. A feeling remarkably similar to happiness swelled in his chest, and he took a sip of the tea at last. It was lukewarm and bitter; the water had scalded the tea, and it had overbrewed by several minutes. But he rolled the taste of it back on his tongue and watched John’s expressive face so very close to his own and felt the gentle beat of John’s pulse at the point where John’s wrist pressed on the back of his hand, and it was perfect.

The day passed quietly, peacefully, with a sandpaper edge of tension. John cooked soldiers and eggs, or attempted to—the eggs came out hard-boiled, at which point John’s face went sour and Sherlock found himself unable to keep from laughing—and they found an old, worn deck of cards and played for a number of hours.

“Oh, hell,” John said around six in the evening, having lost five hands in a row. “I give up; should have known better than to mess with you and your photographic memory. Shall I make dinner?”

“I’m not certain, what do you plan to attempt this time?” Sherlock asked, smirking as John glared at him.

“I’ll check the cabinets,” John said, still scowling slightly as he got up and walked into the kitchen.

Just as John left the room, Sherlock’s phone vibrated in his coat pocket. Crossing the room to the coatrack, he reached into the pocket to find a text from a blocked number.

Mycroft, perhaps. On one of his new high-tech untraceable phones. He swiped at the screen and opened the message to reveal a photo and immediately tensed, all of the laughter draining from his frame.

The photograph showed a man bound to a chair, head lolling to the side as though unconscious; the photo was taken from the back, obscuring the man’s face. But Sherlock had no need of facial features to identify the man who slumped, captured, in a chair in what appeared to be a decrepit warehouse. He knew the particular lines that comprised the man, the way that his hair had the slightest of cowlicks, ruthlessly contained, near the nape of his neck.

Mycroft.

His blood froze in his veins. Sherlock couldn’t move for the adrenaline rush—and, he noted distantly, the shock—and sat for a solid five seconds staring uncomprehending at the photo.

Mycroft. Had been. . . kidnapped?

The phone buzzed again, almost silent against the palm of his hand. This time, a message appeared.

_I’ve got a few things that you value. M_

Fingers hovering over the keyboard, Sherlock found himself unable to move. Text signed with an M, Mycroft always signed his MH—why, why was he still pondering this, he knew who sent this message, even knew just what they wanted. And all the while he could hear John’s gentle humming in the kitchen, oblivious to the way the world had tilted.

The phone buzzed once more, a third text popping up on the screen.

_Midnight. Don’t be late. And don’t forget the pacifier. M_

“How do you feel about risotto?” John called from the kitchen, and Sherlock started.

“It’s fine,” he answered hastily, reading the texts over again. He swore he could hear an Irish lilt even in the words on the screen—but no, that was nonsense, Moriarty was dead. Or that Moriarty was, at least; someone had taken over the position, aided by Mary, Mary who had married John, Mary who had apparently given birth to John’s daughter—

“Well, don’t sound too excited,” John called back, slightly grumpy. “We can have beans from a tin if you prefer.”

“Anything’s fine.”

“I’ll _try_ not to be offended,” John said, reappearing from the kitchen; Sherlock hastily locked his phone. He fixed Sherlock with a piercing stare. “Mycroft?”

For a dreadful moment, he thought John was referring to the figure in the photograph, and then sense came flooding back. “Yes,” he said. Not a lie, technically. But then again, John hated technicalities. “Nothing much to say.”

How could he get out of the cottage and into London without alerting John? Bringing John was obviously out of the question—he needed to rescue Mycroft and the baby, of course, but then what? He would have to leave John behind, but his options were limited: drugs were out, given that the only ones he had access to were not useful and also buried in the sand of the beach; he didn’t think he could bear to knock John unconcious.

He would just have to get a head start, then. And Sherlock blinked slowly, heavily, as he realized just how much his actions would tear the recently-repaired trust between them.

Standing up from the chair, he walked over to John—too close, encroaching on his personal space. John’s pupils dilated and his breathing sped up slightly; Sherlock could see his pulse in his throat.

“I’m not particularly interested in eating,” Sherlock said, voice pitched low, and he watched John’s eyes darken as Sherlock’s hand caressed his hip. “I’m interested in _you_.”

“Well,” John said into Sherlock’s neck, lips just brushing his collarbone. “Nothing else on, yeah?”

 _No,_ Sherlock thought, despairing, and brushed his lips against John’s softly. Then not so softly. The kiss deepened and John backed him against the wall, hard plaster digging into his shoulderblades as John pulled him down and kissed him fiercely.

They fumbled into the bedroom, frenzied and more than a little desperate; it felt as though everything had come to a head. John undressed him, fingers nimbly slipping buttons from buttonholes until Sherlock was bare, and it was all Sherlock could do to keep up with John until he pinned John against the wall and snogged him into compliance before pushing him onto the bad and hitching John’s knees over his shoulders. John’s groan reverberated off the ceiling, and Sherlock would have smiled if he hadn’t found a better use for his mouth.

John pulled at his hair and arched up off the mattress, keeping up a steady stream of curses before finally letting go. Swallowing, he reached down to grasp at himself: it took only a few pulls before he was coming with a bitten-off cry. Just as the aftershocks faded, John pulled him up into a kiss, already relaxed and sleepy.

Mouthing at John’s neck, he allowed himself the momentary indulgence of being held as John’s limbs became pliant with sleep. And then he carefully unwound himself, watching all the while for any disturbance on John’s part, and gathered up his clothing. Sherlock snuck one last look at John, asleep and oblivious, before silently shutting the bedroom door.

He dressed quickly in the small sitting room (“into battle,” he remembered saying, a lifetime ago), pulled the Belstaff on, tugged his scarf around his neck tightly. Scrawled a quick message onto a scrap of paper. And left, the front door closing noiselessly behind him.

It was the work of only a few moments to hotwire the neighbor’s Aston Martin. As he sped toward London, the black countryside rising and falling outside his windows, he knew what he had to do.

It would be a neat trade, Sherlock reasoned—himself for Mycroft and the baby. Fair, in every sense of the word. And in the grand scheme of things, weren’t they of more use? He only regretted hurting John, a pain that sat dull and heavy and all-encompassing in his chest. But John understood sacrifice, as a soldier would, and so—perhaps he would be forgiven.

His foot pressed heavier on the accelerator of the car, and the surroundings blurred past. Three hours. He had only so much time.


	8. Chapter 8

At a quarter to midnight, he pulled into the parking lot of the aquatic centre. It looked so very innocuous, contrary to its history: Carl Power’s death by botulinum, a vest of explosives hanging heavy over John’s chest. The centre’s grey cinder block exterior, darkened by recent rain and cast in relief by sickeningly fluorescent street lights, was implacable.

On the passenger seat, his phone buzzed once more. Picking it up, he noted the texts and missed calls that had punctuated the last two hours of his drive:

_Hey, where’d you go?_

_Seriously, we’re all but on house arrest._

_Your phone isn’t in the house._

_It’s been an hour and I’m more than a little concerned._

_Oh god, you went out to do something idiotic, didn’t you. Call me right now._

_Now that I’m thinking about it I saw you look at your phone like you’d seen a ghost. Was it Moriarty?_

_Fuck, Sherlock, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to leave me behind._

_Don’t leave me out of this again._

_I love you. Don’t do this to me._

Fifteen minutes before midnight, and therefore Sherlock was ahead of schedule: he swiped the green button and answered the call from John.

“Where are you?” John asked as the call connected.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock said, bowing his head in the darkness of the car’s interior, and he heard John curse from the other end of the line.

“Fuck, _no_ —what happened?”

“They’ve got Mycroft,” Sherlock said softly. “And your daughter, and I—” He didn’t finish what he was saying as his throat tightened. His eyes fixed on the speedometer, faintly glowing white as the key sat in the ignition; he refused to acknowledge the faint blur of the crisply designed lines.

“Hey, hey,” John said, concerned now. “Deep breaths—I can hear you panicking from god knows how many miles away. Where are you?”

“Where it started,” he said vaguely, eyes fixed on the 120 km/hr mark. The needle had stayed there for the majority of the drive, until he had entered London.

“That’s—not actually helpful, you realize. What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Sherlock said. “I just have to try, and I’m clever, very clever, so I ought to be able to solve this; I just haven’t tried hard enough.”

“No, goddamnit, no. That’s not—you know that you’re essentially turning yourself in to Moriarty. Of course you do, you’re too smart not to know that.”

Sherlock swallowed; when he spoke, his voice sounded distant. “I don’t see the alternative.”

“There has to be one,” John urged. “Because you can’t. You can’t do that. For me, Sherlock.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them to check the time. Seven minutes till midnight. “Hopefully, just maybe, I’ll be able to return your daughter to you,” he said quietly. “Mycroft will make certain you’re both taken care of. I love you.”

“No,” John said, voice breaking. “No. We’re not going to do this, not going to only say the important things over the phone just before you go into mortal danger; we’re better than that, really we are. When you tell me that you love me for the first time it’s not going to be in a note, or over the phone, or before you think you’re about to die—it’s going to be at a time and place where you can look into my eyes and tell me that honestly. And I’ll tear up a bit and pretend not to, and you’ll do the same, because neither of us are good at this sort of thing, but we’re _going to be_ , because we’ll get to practice it. Over and over and over, we’ll say ‘I love you’ for no other reason than that we mean it. _That_ is what I want, more than anything in the world, and god—please don’t do this, Sherlock. Please.”

Five minutes. “I’m sorry, John,” he said, and disconnected the call.

Focus, now; nothing else to do and everything to lose. He got out of the car, making no attempt to silence the slam of the door, and strode toward the entrance. Sherlock remembered this place as it had been six years ago, and little had changed: insipid posters still covered the walls, the smell of chlorine permeated the humid air.

Tentatively he rounded the corner to the pool, and saw—nothing. Light reflected off the water, the slight waves echoed off the concrete walls of the pool: both held a faintly sinister connotation, and yet the room was empty. Sherlock was momentarily relieved that John wouldn’t be stepping out of the shadows in a vest once more, and yet—there was Mycroft to think of.

He stood still at two minutes to midnight, terrified that he had gotten it wrong. If he had—

His phone buzzed once more with a text, again from a blocked number. _Try upstairs. M_

Of course he had meant the roof. How had he not seen it, it was obvious—stupid, stupid, Sherlock berated himself mentally. A perfect combination of stages.

The roof was two stories up; Sherlock took the steps hastily and pushed through the door with a kind of reckless grace. The first rule of meeting with an enemy, Mycroft had told him as a child, was to never let them see your fear. Mycroft had been fourteen at the time, supercilious and with a penchant for Machiavellian scheming; Sherlock had been seven and in the last (embarrassing) throes of hero-worship. He thought of Mycroft and straightened his spine, pushed down his fear and pulled at his own reckless desire for danger and the edge of death—and opened the door with a dramatic flourish.

Silhouetted against the lights of the building across, Mycroft faced away and leaned his weight on his brolly, one foot tucked over the other neatly. He didn’t move, even when the door clanged metallically as it shut. There was no semtex vest, no red sniper dot: he appeared trapped under the weight of his helplessness alone.

“Oh, Sherlock,” he sighed. “What have you done?”

For a moment, confusion stayed his tongue. Slightly out of breath, the spot where a bullet had pierced his sternum aching, he found his voice and spoke tersely. “I believed myself to be saving your fat arse. What are _you_ doing?”

Mycroft tilted his head down, exposing his pale neck under the expensive fabric of his suit; he looked oddly vulnerable in the half light. It was wrong, so very wrong, and Sherlock’s unease grew.

“I’m sorry,” Mycroft said softly. “I tried.”

“Tried what?” he asked, becoming alarmed. “Mycroft, what is going on?”

“Just know that I have always tried to protect you, to the best of my evidently inferior ability. That I have never wanted to hurt you,” and here his voice caught slightly, but he coughed delicately and finished in a tone as dry as sandpaper: “and that I am truly, truly sorry, Sherlock.”

“What _for_?” Sherlock asked again. “Mycroft, what is—”

“Hullo, Sherlock.”

A soft voice, coming out of the darkness to Sherlock’s left; familiar in its cooing, cloying quality. Sherlock’s hackles rose, but he schooled his face and turned slowly to meet the source of the voice. “Hello, Mary.”

“Good to see you again, I suppose,” she said lightly, still wreathed in darkness. Sherlock couldn’t make her out. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me here.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had much of a choice.”

“That was rather the idea,” Mary replied. “I see you’ve had a loving reunion with your brother. Do you understand yet?”

He felt slow, dull, stupid; he felt the shape of a net wrapping around him but couldn’t yet understand its components. “You lured me here under the false belief that my brother was in imminent danger—”

“Oh, certainly not false, the both of you are very much in imminent danger.”

“—but not the sort of danger that brought me here,” Sherlock continued as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “I was led to believe that he had been forcibly captured; presumably the bug in the CCTV is currently being unraveled—” Mycroft nodded slightly, still not facing him— “and that was meant to provide an opportunity with which to kidnap him. Instead he appears to be here largely of his own will, although not entirely by any means.” He frowned as Mycroft’s shoulders slumped. “I was _also_ led to believe that I would meet Moriarty. Tell me, was that yet another misunderstanding?”

Mary didn’t answer. He could hear the light footsteps moving closer, although she remained in the shadows. Try as he might, he couldn’t see her.

“You’re quite right on one account: you will be meeting Moriarty tonight,” she said slowly, and Sherlock tried to decipher her tone: did he detect a hint of frustration? No matter, he could hear the triumph overlaying it. “But tell me honestly, what did you expect to happen here tonight? No backup, no plan. One might almost think that you _want_ to be caught.”

It was Sherlock’s turn to stay silent. He stood with his hands folded behind his back neatly and wondered at what he had been thinking—but that was just it. He hadn’t been thinking, hadn’t logically evaluated a plan of action; he had seen the photo of his brother and a chance to do right by John and acted purely on instinct. And judging by Mycroft’s reaction, he hadn’t expected it.

Sherlock remembered Mycroft’s almost-flinches over the past few weeks, the times at which it had looked as though he had wanted to say something and refrained. He thought of his brother’s apology as he entered the rooftop and realized that neither he nor John had paid for the furniture for the nursery—Mycroft had, entirely uncharacteristically, picked up the tab. He remembered the way that Mycroft always looked cagy when Moriarty was in the thick of things; understood for the first time that there must have been a reason beyond that of his little brother’s safety.

“Mycroft,” he said in lieu of answering Mary, “what is happening?”

The muscles of Mycroft’s back tensed even through his suit, but he did not turn around; Sherlock had the eerie sensation that he was conversing entirely with ghosts. Well, he could solve that problem—he strode forward and grabbed his brother by the forearm, yanking him around.

Finally he met his eyes, the movement slow and out of sync with Sherlock’s force, and Mycroft—Mycroft of MI6, Mycroft the Iceman, Mycroft who all but ran the country—Mycroft looked pale and wan and guilty. And scared, oh god. He’d almost forgotten that his brother knew the emotion at all.

But mostly he looked as though he was already grieving the death of a loved one by his hand.

Sherlock physically stumbled back, so great was his sense of betrayal. “You—you’re working for Moriarty,” he stuttered artlessly, shocked to his very core. For a moment he wondered if the roof wouldn’t pitch him straight off into the night sky—but no, that was far too _nice_ a way to go; the universe had already proved itself merciless. Or maybe just indifferent. He’d never been able to catalogue the difference.

There was no confirmation; he needed none. Inaccuracies, aberrations slid neatly into place like puzzle pieces. In half a heartbeat he reviewed the past six years—god, six years—from this angle, and oh, he could _see_ now.

Mycroft’s gaze had fixed on Sherlock’s face as he absorbed the blow. Slowly, carefully, he said “I’m. . . sorry.”

“How could you, how _could_ you,” Sherlock repeated, but his survival instincts were beginning to kick in and transform his betrayal and hurt into a hard lump of fury lodged in his sternum. Just the size and shape and heat of a bullet just fired, and twice as dangerous.

“I was trying to protect you,” Mycroft said, sounding quite helpless.

Sherlock gestured wildly: at the rooftop, the pool beneath, the entirety of London and the last six years. “And yet,” he bit out scathingly.

Mary laughed, and Sherlock twitched slightly. He’d all but forgotten that Mary was there as well, likely watching the two of them with malicious glee. “Touching as this is,” she said, “that’s not what we’re here for.”

“Thought we were just passing the time until Moriarty bothered to show,” Sherlock said, throwing a hard glance at Mycroft. “And while we’re on the subject—tangentially, at least—I was told there were _two_ things that I ought to barter for.”

“Oh, yes,” she said amusedly. “Of course. What, you didn’t notice the crib in your hurry to meet with a criminal mastermind? Tsk tsk, Sherlock.”

He stood still for a second, running over his path through the building to confirm the lack of a baby before understanding that Mary had been taunting him. Despite his lack of response, he had taken slightly too long to respond and gave himself away: she laughed once more. “Oh, dear. You actually believed that I was telling the truth, didn’t you?”

Half of his thoughts were running haywire, the other half frozen in shock and dismay, and yet he managed to say “I?”

“You never did see it, did you? And here I thought I’d been too obvious.” And with that she emerged from the shadows, and—oh. Oh.

Oh god.

In the darkness, Mary appeared as a predator, moving lithely over the roof. Her hair was dark, but that was not the biggest change to her appearance. Mary’s stomach was flat—not the figure of a woman who had recently given birth, but of a woman who had never had a child to begin with.

“You never—you weren’t—”

“It was only ever your own _deduction_ ,” she said, laying bitter emphasis on the word. “The wine actually was bloody awful that day. And I’d seen the way he looked at you. That best man’s speech, my god—you always prided yourself on being indifferent, didn’t you? It must gall you endlessly that he got so far under your skin. It wouldn’t have lasted, I knew that not even hours into our marriage, and then you handed me the perfect weapon. Thank you for that.”

It felt like the bare moment before falling off the roof of Bart’s: gravity taking hold, toes just nudging into open air. The moment when Sherlock knew that he would fall, that it couldn’t be reversed, that he was mortal and terrifyingly breakable: arms outstretched in a feeble pantomime of wings. He had a vivid memory, insignificant and diamond-clear, of the sensation of a tear dropping toward the ground below as he was suspended in the in-between moment between safety and death.

“You,” Sherlock said, this time to Mycroft. “You had to have known.”

“Yes.”

“And you let us—” he blinked rapidly, thought of a star-speckled nursery and a crib and god, childhood stuffed animals and books— “you perpetuated this. You needn’t have—”

There had been a fleeting moment after Sherlock’s feet left the ground that day, after gravity had taken hold and fear had coursed through him so very strongly that he thought he’d die of it: a quarter-heartbeat when the ice had turned to fire inside his veins, better than the very best cocaine, and in the exhilaration he hadn’t cared a whit if he lived or died, and god, it was lovely, it was nothing short of perfection. Sherlock had wanted to laugh at the monster in the abyss, throw it flowers to madden it further.

And so now, alienated and alone and grieving, he faced Mary and laughed. A flash of teeth, quick and furious: “And what _for_ ? Why are you _doing_ all of this?”

“You always did ask the wrong questions. All those months of trying to figure it out—who am I?”

And then everything slid into place. “You said ‘I’ earlier. It’s you. You’re Moriarty.”

Mary—Moriarty—tilted her head to the side in a curiously serpentine manner. “So I am. It really did take you this long, then. Pity. I always did wonder what Jim saw in you, and I suppose I’ll never know.”

“So you haven’t always been Moriarty, then. It’s a title.”

“More or less. We’re not like you posh gits, we don’t have _titles_. He ran the syndicate until—would you care to guess?”

“Bart’s,” Sherlock said immediately. “But then, there’s one thing I never understood. Why didn’t he fake his own death, just as I did mine?”

Mary grinned mirthlessly at him. “Oh, he tried. Give him points for that.”

“He died because of a failure to unload a handgun? How disappointing. . . unless, of course, that wasn’t the case at all.” He caught the slight gleam of her eye at this. “Ah. Let me guess: you had something to do with it.”

Mary shrugged carelessly, leaning against a chimney. The wind tossed at her hair. “You were an expensive diversion. He’d been doing so well, actually, what with the accounts and such—and then he had to play a _game_ that cost us millions of dollars and a fair few clients, many of whom had real power. It had to end.”

“You loaded the gun.”

“Of course.”

“You watched. You saw—” and he cut off, realizing what ought to have been obvious years ago.

“Yes, yes, I got to watch you dive off a building onto a glorified trampoline,” she finished, smirking slightly. “After that it was easy.”

Sherlock stood tall against the bitter wind. A strand of hair blew crosswise against his forehead; he ignored it. “So why didn’t you kill me at that point? Ought to have been easy enough. _Why_?”

“I didn’t realize it until he’d kicked the bucket, but Jim had some very practical reasons for toying with you. Now, don’t be flattered: I mean your brother. Pressure points, you should remember those quite well. Mycroft’s is you. Yours is John’s. And if you thought that John’s was mine—well. You understand why I wanted to get to know John Watson, don’t you?”

“But now,” Sherlock said, choosing his words carefully, “now it’s no longer a concern. I’m irrelevant. And you’ve decided to dispose of me.”

Walking closer, Mary appeared even more dangerous than when she had first appeared out of the shadows: there was an absolute calm and certainty to her gaze that unnerved Sherlock. Jim had always been half-manic, obsessive, changeable; Mary would not hesitate unless it was to her benefit to do so. This he knew from experience. “Truly sorry, Sherlock,” she said, face set and all playacting done; to his side, Mycroft shut his eyes. “Really. It was a pleasure, I suppose.”

“You want me to jump from the roof,” he said dully, already anticipating the fall to come. “Really, three stories? Bit ignominious.”

“Perfect, then,” Mary said, eyebrows arched as though waiting for Sherlock’s disapproval.

“Isn’t it,” Sherlock said dryly, and stepped onto the ledge. For the briefest of moments he was able to lose himself in the view surrounding him: beyond the low buildings and the banality of the architecture he could see the streets, thick with light, and imagined the people bustling through them—not always good or bad, he knew now, but flawed, complex, more worthy than he had given them credit for—and he thought for a brief moment, with the Shard glimmering faintly in the distance, that this wasn’t such a bad end after all.

And then he caught a faint glimmer, almost imperceptible, off the building across and smiled. Grinned, really, nearly as widely as he had when he thought he’d found a loophole in Moriarty’s plan (god, how that had turned out) but now he grinned because he saw it—the real escape route.

“Well, then,” he said, “far be it from me to deny the course.” He looked over his shoulder at Mycroft, who looked nearly catatonic with sorrow. “Mycroft,” he said, and his brother’s eyes snapped up to meet his unwillingly, expecting words of reprimand or blame—

“Vatican Cameos.”

And gunshots rang out into the night as both Mycroft and Sherlock ducked to the ground. Sherlock moved as though on autopilot, and for a moment his ears vibrated with the violence of the sound and then with the silence that followed. After a tense moment of quiet, Sherlock carefully untucked himself from a wall.

Sirens began to wail in the background as officers in bulletproof vests poured through the door to the roof, sweeping the roof for explosives or any other sign of danger. “John,” Sherlock breathed, astonished.

“New Scotland Yard,” Mycroft corrected him.

“Do you really think that I want your opinion at this moment? John must have called Lestrade.”

Satellite phones crackled with static across the roof; Sherlock heard the Met’s officers making curt assessments and ending with “over.” He crept across the chimney to look at the other side of the roof, where Mary had been standing.

It was nothing he hadn’t expected to see. Crumpled in death, she looked smaller than she ever had while alive; the angle obscured the exact nature of the fatal wound. Truthfully, he didn’t care to see: the peculiarly rigid laxness of her limbs, the smears of blood coloring the gritty concrete were enough for him. As he watched, an officer grasped her wrist with gloved fingers to ensure that there was no pulse.

Hesitantly he stood, leaning against the support of the chimney as he swayed slightly. No one stopped him, admonished him to take cover; he wondered if he’d have noticed as the world smeared like smudges of paint in front of his eyes.

“Sherlock!” A familiar voice, rough like whisky and likely hoarse from swearing; he turned to locate the source and stumbled slightly. Arms grasped at his shoulders and it was this hold, this familiar hold that he remembered from deep within his mind palace from overdoses two and three, that jarred his memory: Lestrade. “Easy, you arse, you’re in shock. Can I get a blanket over here?” Lestrade yelled to a member of his team.

A blanket in a horrid shade of orange was tugged over his shoulders, and for once he didn’t fight it even as the shade itched at his corneas.

His confusion must have been obvious, because Lestrade started to explain. “John called me almost as soon as he knew you were missing. He’s not stupid—well, obviously you know that—and he guessed that you’d been coerced into meeting Moriarty. I pulled all of my influence to put people at the ready, and it’s lucky that I did because he called at five till telling me that you’d be at a pool—by the way, he mentioned fucking _explosives_ from nearly six years ago? Are you fucking kidding me, honestly, that’s the kind of thing you _tell me about_ —and so we hauled arse and got here. Saved yours, looks like.”

He nodded, still slightly removed from everything. The smears of color were crystallising into over-bright sharp lines even as exhaustion swamped him, and he felt Lestrade squeeze his arm gently as he turned to Mycroft.

“And just what are you doing here?”

A sudden surge of adrenaline—surprising, he would have thought he’d burned through his receptors already—spurred him to focus on Mycroft, and he didn’t like what he saw. Mycroft looked defeated and weary, as though he was planning to do something unutterably _idiotic_ like confess that he’d been working with Moriarty. Mycroft’s chin lowered, and— _no_.

“He was lured here,” Sherlock said quickly, focusing on Lestrade and ignoring the almost imperceptible inhale to his left. “You don’t have the clearances for this one, obviously, given—well, Mycroft—but you can rest assured it will be documented and an almost-true version disseminated for what passes as Scotland Yard’s records.” Rambling, perhaps—but he was in shock, it would be excused, and anyway now Mycroft knew that he had no intention of turning him in.

“That’s a comfort,” Lestrade said drily. “Come with me, then. John told me to keep you safe until he could arrive and—well, I think ‘kill you himself’ was what he said. He’s a bit worked up.”

“Such a comfort.”

He followed Lestrade down the stairs regardless, breathing through his mouth so as to minimize the pervasive scent of chlorine, and Mycroft followed on his heels. Outside he sat heavily on the steps of the building, pulling the blanket around him tightly, and Lestrade looked at him with concern. “Let me guess: you won’t consent to being checked over.”

“Of course not.”

“I tried,” Lestrade muttered and moved a few yards away to talk to the chief inspector, who appeared almost purple with apoplexy.

“If you could use some of that formidable _influence_ to ensure that Lestrade is duly rewarded, that would be much appreciated,” Sherlock drawled to Mycroft, who sat next to him as inelegantly as Sherlock had ever seen him. He appeared confounded; struggled against a question that eventually found its way to his lips unbidden. “Why?”

“Because Lestrade was, relatively speaking, quite useful today,” Sherlock said, and Mycroft rolled his eyes. It was always a joy to see his brother lose his hard-won composure, even furious as he was. “You first.”

“Why. . .” Mycroft mused, drawing the word out as though tasting the bitter events and forcing himself to endure them further. “Quite simple, as far as these things go. Moriarty was desperate for my attention; he got it by means of means of threatening your life. The bomb across the street—it was a warning, the first time I refused to comply. He found the means to break into your home later, and if that weren’t quite enough he lured you in, as a moth to a flame. The only means to rid myself of hs influence would have meant your death. I pushed the limits as far as I dared. Your life was essential; everything else secondary.” He met Sherlock’s eyes. “It was a neatly woven trap.”

“All of this time—” Sherlock started, unable to finish; he remembered Serbia, a pipe cracking his ribs in a damp prison, a whip lashing at his back, the constant hollow of hunger and panic in his stomach.

“No. I thought, after Moriarty’s ignoble end in the rooftop of Saint Bartholomew’s, that it was over.” He sighed. “I was—mistaken.”

They sat side by side and watched the officers mill around in choreographed patterns, the practiced chaos of a crime scene. Blue and red lights flickered off the concrete; skittered up Sherlock’s spine.

“It goes without saying that you will fix this. All of it. Take apart the network properly.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t forgive you,” he said flatly, not looking at his brother.

Mycroft replied in an undertone. “Nor do I expect you to. Just know this—I never intended for you to be hurt.”

“And the whole world could go hang.”

“If it must,” Mycroft replied, unrepentant. His facade had repaired itself, the cracks seamlessly sealed; he watched the people around them with a casual disdain. “You know the nature of the world and its inhabitants. It would be no great loss.”

For a moment, Sherlock considered this. Hadn’t he thought the same, once? That he was so clever and extraordinary that the entirety of London existed to be nothing more than his playground, that the people around him mattered only for their utility, that humanity as a whole was better off fueling a grease fire than walking the earth. But he had been a different person then: three overdoses in and too brilliant and too bright and furious at the world. Beneath the wool armour of his Belstaff he had been vulnerable; Sherlock had hidden the too-deep hollows between his ribs with the sharp bite of a needle and the thrill of the chase and the longing pull of the void and a quiet certainty that nobody could ever understand him.

And then came John. Who was ordinary, almost painfully so, and yet so complex and lovely and multifaceted that Sherlock had been forced to reassess. He had no illusions—he doubted that there were even half a dozen people so remarkable as John Watson—and yet he could not delete the fact that the people he had scorned as so painfully dull had lives and thoughts and inner worlds just as he did. It struck him improbably hard, this elementary deduction, and refused to leave; it settled in the pit of his stomach.

“Yes,” Sherlock said quietly, the form of a conclusion settling implacably into somewhere in his sternum, “yes, it would.”

Mycroft looked startled before the lines of his forehead smoothed into regret. “You’ve always had too big a heart.”

“Which is preferable to having none at all.”

He nodded at that, seemingly to himself, before standing. Somehow, even amidst the confusion, he’d kept his umbrella by his side; he tapped it on the sidewalk now. “I suppose your doctor will take good care of it.” The ghost of a smile flitted briefly over Mycroft’s thin lips. “See that he does, yes?”

Mycroft hesitated. Finally he said, “I’m sorry,” and walked away with his typical disdainful insouciance. Suit perfectly in place and brolly swinging at his side, one might never have guessed that he had been in mortal danger not an hour before.

Sherlock remained on the concrete steps, observing his surroundings; the chill had crept from the pavement and crawled into his bones despite the intervention of the blanket. It didn’t matter; he felt comfortably numb amidst the Dali-esque surrealism of the scene. And then, _then_ , he heard John’s commanding voice cutting through the damp night air.

“Protocols be damned, where is he?”

Lestrade caught his arm and gestured toward Sherlock, who immediately stood. His legs felt weak beneath him. Meeting John’s gaze, he saw a range of emotions cross over his face—rage and terror and worry all at once—before they formed a single, concise emotion, shining through the space between them: relief. John walked toward him deliberately, no trace of a limp, no tremor in his hand, and for a moment Sherlock felt as though his heart would crack wide open, exposing both the jagged edges and devastatingly tender insides.

“Sherlock,” John breathed when he reached him, hands grasping his forearms, “oh, god, _Sherlock_. You, you’re—”

“John, I have to tell you something, two things actually—”

“—you’re alive,” John continued, mercilessly holding onto his arms, their bodies a bare inch from touching. “You wanker, you, you absolute arse, you cock, how could you _do_ that to me—”

“—three things, come to think of it, and I need to tell you _now_. And then you can go, if you want. I won’t stop you.”

At this John became quiet, although his grip was no less intense. “I very much doubt that, but. Go on.”

Staring down at John, he took care to memorize the dear lines of his face in case it was the last time he saw it—the curve of his jaw, the way that his eyebrows were so damned expressive and lovely, just so lovely. “John,” he began softly, “I—I made a mistake. About the baby.” The words expanded in his throat as he spoke, choking him on the way out, but he held firm. “There was—there never was a baby. I was mistaken, all of those months ago. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

And John’s face crumpled horribly, all the worse for the minute nature of the changes. His lips pressed in, brows downturned; he blinked his eyes rapidly. Sherlock could still see the police lights flashing in their bright reflection. “No,” he said reflexively, shaking his head. “No, it—”

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock repeated, standing helpless and rigid under the weight of his guilt and his—yes, his own grief. He wondered how he could mourn the loss of an almost-person who had never even existed.

They stood facing each other for a moment, locked onto the other and breathing unsteadily, before John looked up. “Three things, you said?”

“Yes—four now, actually,” he said slowly, gauging John’s ability to bear it—but that was absurd, John had always been the stronger one, and so he continued. “Mary was Moriarty; had been since Bart’s. She is now dead. I didn’t do it,” he added to preempt the inevitable question.

John shook his head and tossed it back, not bothering to conceal the glitter of tears in his eyes. “Of course. Christ, what does it say about me that I’m not even surprised? And you said there were four things.”

“I just—I wanted to let you know before you leave—I love you. I wanted to say it in person at least once,” Sherlock whispered, head bowed. “And so now you can go.”

“Oh no. No, _no_. I’m not leaving, not for anything, and neither are you, unless of course you want to. You absolute madman. We’ve come—” and here John broke, fault lines falling like so much sand, and his shoulders slumped— “we’ve come so fucking far. So don’t you dare back out now on some pretense of decency.”

For a moment he couldn’t breathe. “I won’t hold you to that, you know. You’re in shock as well. You should have a blanket.” And he slung his off his shoulder and offered it to John, palms up, an act of supplication. The cold slipped into his seams, and it felt like a minor penance.

“You don’t have to, you gorgeous madman, I can promise you that I’ve wanted nothing more than to stay with you for any number of years. And no, I’m not going to put on that blanket, thank you very much. Jesus, that’s a perfectly horrid color.”

“Van Gogh said that orange is the color of insanity,” Sherlock said before his brain caught up with his mouth. He shut his eyes, angry at himself, only to hear the incongruously high pitch of John’s giggle.

“Is it, now? That must explain why Lestrade keeps trying to force it on you. If that’s the case, though—” and here he felt the fabric being pulled out from his hands. Opening his eyes, Sherlock saw John tuck the blanket neatly around his own shoulders, encasing him in the horrendously bright color, and Sherlock couldn’t even care, what did it _mean_ —”well, then. Here I am.”

“You’re mad.”

“That’s rather exactly what I’m trying to say, thanks for noticing.”

“This is—” he tried to explain, and it came out rather desperately— “a bad time to make these sorts of decisions.”

“Of course it is,” John said, standing too close in the dark of night, only yards away from the Met’s finest; broken and grieving and yet his eyes still locked on Sherlock’s with something approximating _love_ . “Of course. But god, how I love you. And I want so badly to say that love won’t fix everything—of course it won’t—and yet. . . we’re due this, this is _owed_ to us. So maybe, just maybe, if we’re careful and reckless and _insane_ enough—love will be enough. Conquer it all. Let’s give it a go.”

He looked in John’s dark eyes and broke at his feet, sharp shards and blood-hot tenderness littering the pavement at his feet. “I love you,” he said hoarsely, “yes, yes, let’s—” and then John pushed him against the wall of the aquatic centre and kissed him as though the world was ending, and he tugged on the edges of the shock blanket to pull him ever closer; tried to consume him and the feel of John’s hands gripping at him so tightly. John’s lips on his were hot in the frigid air; he kissed back with equal passion and desperation.

They broke apart to find half of the Yard staring at them. Sherlock fought the urge to duck his head; John appeared not to notice them at all, taking Sherlock’s hand in his. Dimly, Sherlock noted the warmth of his hand, thought that his own residual heat in the blanket had warmed John as well: the thought made him oddly pleased.

“Let’s go home,” John said, their hands entwined. “Back to Baker Street.”

Sherlock nodded, not trusting his voice, and they walked away from the crime scene together.


	9. Chapter 9

Six months later, Sherlock woke up alone in his bed. The sheets next to his were rumpled and slightly warmer than room temperature—John must have gotten out of bed within the past forty-five minutes. Judging by the angle of the sunlight falling over the hardwood floor it was not yet seven in the morning: it was unusual for John to rise at this hour. He frowned slightly, pushing himself upright to investigate.

The vertebrae in his spine crackled as he rose from the bed, slightly stiff. He was beginning to feel closer to his age—but then again, last night had done his body no favors. He smirked slightly at the dark abrasion on his wrists, just visible under the loose sleeve of John’s navy jumper.

Stepping out into the sitting room, hair tousled and slightly disheveled, he found the flat empty. The only sign of life was the kettle, set low so as not to scorch the water, and two mugs with teabags resting gently on the bottoms. John was nearby, then—wouldn’t jeopardize the integrity of the kettle—and knew that Sherlock was awake. He was. . . hiding?

A note on the counter, written on the back of a worn envelope, caught his eye; he snatched at it and held it between his hands. In John’s lovely, messy scrawl, it read:

_Go up to the roof._

That was the whole of the note, and Sherlock scanned the quiet of the flat suspiciously before walking up the stairs. He averted his eyes from John’s old bedroom as he passed it and took the last few stairs quickly, throwing open the door to reveal—no one.

But in the middle of the roof, unmistakable and obvious, stood a beehive. Reaching up to about Sherlock’s waist, the box-shaped structure was made of plywood; he pulled open a drawer to reveal frames. Empty, of course; he had known from the stillness of the air that the bees had yet to arrive, and still—

He shut his eyes briefly, almost unable to bear the happiness coursing through his veins thick and golden as the honey that he would soon produce. The sultry autumn morning surrounded him with its slight dampness and pale sunlight; he opened his eyes to see the very tops of fiery trees. And now that Sherlock looked around more closely, he noticed the planters edging the roof. Full of rich dark soil—recently watered, his mind supplied—they released their earthy scent into the fall morning. Small packets of seeds were tied to slight stakes; he observed the nearest. Lavender. Sunflowers. Sage, basil, thyme, cilantro (he’d have to throw that one out before John decided to cook with it, of course; cilantro was less an herb than a punishment).

He strode over the other side of the roof and laughed into the morning, throwing his head back in genuine amusement. Of course John had included foxglove and nightshade along with a suitable variety of poisonous plants that Sherlock was already mentally planning experiments for.

Oh, John. God, how was he so perfect—?

He looked over his shoulder at the door, expecting to find John leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed in amusement. But he was still nowhere to be seen, and so Sherlock cast a last look over the rooftop and returned downstairs. Recklessly, he took the steps two at a time, threw the door to that flat open—and stopped dead at the sight of John sitting calmly at the kitchen table.

“Morning,” John said casually after finishing his sip of tea, not in the least bit bothered by Sherlock’s theatrics. “Tea?’

The mug, still with its biro-scrawled inscription, sat at Sherlock’s seat, steaming gently and with just the right amount of milk. Taking his cues from John, as always, he sat down and took a sip, savoring the full flavor of black tea. Only then did he say “You bought me a beehive.”

“I—yes. I did.”

He sat there for a moment, the silence between them somehow both familiar and charged. “Must have had a devil of a time getting Mrs Hudson to agree, I’d imagine.”

“Oh, you’re quite right about that. She objected at first, at least until I explained the ultimate plan.”

Sherlock sipped his tea contemplatively. John’s eyes darkened slightly as he looked at the marks on his wrist, and a slight smirk curled at the edge of Sherlock’s mouth. “Did she. And what, might I ask, _is_ the ultimate plan?”

In response, John set a small black box in front of him. The sunlight came through the window at just the right angle to illuminate the velvet in a dull gold around the edges. He inhaled, brain stuttering.

“Six months.” John clasped his hands on the table, dipped his head on an inhale, and let his words be pulled out of him on the exhale. “Six months, you said. That’s how long you would give me to come to my senses and leave. That’s how long I had to wait.”

“You proposed when you were exhausted and drunk and half-mad with grief, less than a week after everything. I couldn’t—I wasn’t about to hold you to anything.” Sherlock bowed his head. “It wasn’t for lack of—”

They sat for a moment, the weight of the past six months between them—their shared grief and anger and the slow, torturous climb to a new normal. The holes had taken ages to flesh out; the scars had not yet faded. They both knew each other’s worst; but there was a kind of painful beauty in it—they could draw a map of each other under the skin, trace the deep aching shadows and too-bright too-tender hopeful curves; they knew intimately and without pretense the peculiarities of the other’s heart.

John cleared his throat. “I understand. I did then. It wasn’t fair, or anything close to it. I just. I wanted you. Want you. I want to spend my life with you and love you just as much as you deserve. And I want to spend the rest of my life here with you. Damn retirement, damn the rest of the world: we’ll still be here in London, in 221b, with you tending your bees and me—well, tending your bee stings, probably—and chasing after criminals every other week: less frequently than we do now, but can you picture a life without murder anymore? And we don’t need rings on our fingers for that, but god, do I want them.”

He looked at John and loved him; quietly, fiercely. “In that case,” he said softly, “how could I say no?”

Sherlock opened the box to reveal a simple palladium ring. Unadorned and unmarked: perfect. He made to slip it onto his ring finger, but John laid two gentle fingers on the side of his hand. “Let me,” he said, marine eyes earnest in the buttery light of early morning, and he slid the ring onto Sherlock’s left hand.

John didn’t let go but twisted his hand to cradle Sherlock’s tenderly. “I love you,” Sherlock said, newly surprised by how the words had carved grooves into the cavern of his mouth; he savored the idea that they would become rote but no less fraught with meaning.

“And I you,” John answered, leaning toward him and catching their lips together in a perfect storm of a kiss: bruising and yet tender, lingering even as John pulled back after a moment. Their foreheads still touched. After a moment of mingling hushed breaths, John let out a breathy laugh. “I suppose this means we’ll have a wedding.”

“Courthouse. Quick and simple,” Sherlock said with a slight shudder.

“If you prefer,” John said, “but I quite like the idea of promising the rest of my life to you in front of our closest friends.”

“Yes, all three of them,” he quipped, but he couldn’t deny the warmth that spread through him at the thought of John making vows to him in front of everyone. “I’ll agree on one condition: you have to wear a proper suit.”

“You’d like that, would you? Consider it done. It can still be simple, just a quick ceremony and then dinner at Angelo’s, perhaps?”

Sherlock pictured it in his head: John in a well-cut black suit, hair styled to the side; vows at the courthouse; an intimate dinner with free-flowing wine at Angelo’s. John’s hand in his, John’s ring on his finger, his ring on John’s. “Yes,” he said.

“We can take a honeymoon,” John said, “anywhere you like.”

“Somewhere far, far away from people.”

“That tired of idiocy, are you?”

“Always, but that isn’t why,” Sherlock said. “Light pollution. I want to be in the far north or in a desert, somewhere you can see the stars.” Almost shyly, he added “You can teach me the constellations.”

John’s grip on him tightened the slightest bit; he swallowed visibly. “I’d—be honored, really. Though I’d prefer to go north if it’s all the same to you. Had rather enough of deserts. And we can see the northern lights as well.”

“Aurora borealis. That’s. . . good,” he said with difficulty; tears started to form in the corners of his eyes.

John noticed, of course: a strong arm wrapped around his back, pulling him in, and he buried his face in the wool of John’s jumper. “Hey,” John murmured, rubbing circles into the small of his back, “what’s wrong?”

He inhaled the scent of musk and tea and wool, shuddering a humid exhale into the fabric. After a moment he could speak again, but kept his face hidden. “I never thought that I would have this,” he said simply. Sherlock knew that John would understand.

They stayed like that for a moment, entwined in each other, before separating a bit awkwardly. Engaged to be married, and yet they found themselves looking at each other speechlessly, uncertain of what to say. That part never ends, Sherlock thought, slightly disappointed.

John broke the silence first. “So why bees, then?” he asked, picking up a thread of a conversation from six months ago. “I know you love them. I don’t know why, yet.”

“They’re fascinating,” he murmured, relaxing. “The social structure of the hive is a marvel. Honey, obviously, is—”

“Your favorite food,” John interrupted with a small grin.

“—delicious,” he finished, the words incongruous with the glare he shot at John. “But really. . . it’s the order. The patterns. So precise and mathematical; it’s _gorgeous_ if you can observe it properly. The natural world’s van Gogh, perhaps.”

John is watching him intently, looking as though is committing every word to memory, and so Sherlock continues. “The hexagonal structure of the honeycomb—it’s so perfect, so calming. It’s like,” he gestures, “hmm—white subway tiles set with black grout. Or maybe the ending of that one song by Radiohead, something with ‘police’ in the title: the song is a gritty-rust red outlined in black, but at the end it inverts; black outlined in translucent golden red. The black is like obsidian, jagged and sleek all at once, but it’s also static. White light bounces off of it. It’s stunning.”

“You do realize that none of these things are a bit alike, yes?” John asks conversationally. “Most people don’t equate Karma Police with honeycombs.”

“Most people are dull.”

“Yes,” John agreed, turning fond at the edges; none of this has appeared to disturb him in the slightest. “Yes, they are, aren’t they?”

John ran a thumb over his knuckles and smiled at the ring on his finger. The slightly oxidized metal was dark against Sherlock’s pale skin, unmistakable and impossible to ignore. He wanted John to have a similar ring—silver instead of gold, this time around—that demarcated him as Sherlock’s. Possessive, perhaps. _Not good_ , he’s almost certain. It’s true nonetheless.

“So does that mean that Karma Police is the song playing in your head at the moment? Bit depressing, given that we just got engaged.” John raised an eyebrow, gently teasing him.

“No, no, that goes with the honeycombs, and only the very end. Right now—” and he thought for a moment of the now-familiar now-uncomplicated affection that ran through his veins and the light streaming in through open windows and a life lived together— “'Nude,' I think.”

_You paint yourself white_

_And fill up with noise_

_There'll be something missing_

Butter-yellow like the sunlight and bittersweet, with better things to come. _There’ll be something missing_ —and he thought for a moment of an empty bedroom and a wistful kind of ache that stole over him, one that he was certain John shared.

John smiled up at him, unaware of the turn his thoughts had taken. “Was that a request?”

“A song title.”

“Ha, think I remember that one now.”

John was teasing him gently, but Sherlock’s attention was focused elsewhere. Months, and he hadn’t mentioned it: too new, too raw. But maybe now was the moment. “There is one thing, though,” he heard himself say.

“Yes?”

“I want—god, how I want—everything that you do and more. I want to track down criminals and wake up in your arms and keep bees. I want to eat takeout from the Indian place down the street at two in the morning and watch those terrible television programmes that you enjoy so unaccountably together and have you yell at me about my experiments because it means that you’re _here_. But there’s one thing that I don’t want.” Sherlock exhaled. “I don’t want an empty bedroom upstairs.”

Clouds darkened John’s face, and Sherlock knew he had hurt him. Left hand clenching slightly, John strove to keep his voice normal. “I understand,” he said, voice strained. “We, I suppose we can empty it out soon enough. Past time, really. Turn it into—something, I don’t know what—”

“No,” he said, his breath bleeding from him. “No, that’s—that’s not what I meant.”

John looked at him then, and Sherlock let his heart pour into his face and hoped that John could see it. For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was that of their hushed breathing. Even the traffic was muted. “You mean—?” John asked after a moment in a near whisper.

“Yes,” Sherlock replied, letting his hope slide vulnerably across his face.

John rested his elbows at the table, exhaled. He wanted nothing more than to comfort John but refrained, knowing that John needed a moment. Eventually he lifted his head from his hands. “I’m not saying no. Really I’m not. My god, I want this so badly, and you—”

“I want it desperately,” he admitted in a low voice.

John raised his eyebrows, eyes glittering slightly. It looked as though he had imploded silently and was now rebuilding the capacity to respond.

“You said earlier that you knew immediately that you wanted to marry me, and said no the first time I asked anyway. And this isn’t the same—” he trailed off for a moment, shook his head. “Nevermind. The point is—”

“Six months,” Sherlock said.

“Yes. I want it so badly that I can’t think rationally, and this is—serious. Huge. It would change our lives forever, and the baby’s as well. I just—we’re rebuilding the foundations, you and I. That comes first. It has to.”

“So you’re saying that you’ll consider it in another six months.”

“No,” John corrected, grazing a gentle hand against Sherlock’s cheekbone. “What I’m saying is, if you ask me in another six months: I’ll say yes.”

—

Nine months later, an ordinary spring day. London’s spring was dull and damp, and this was no exception: rain tapped politely at the windows, collecting in puddles that boasted the iridescent sheen of petrol.

In the upstairs room of 221b, Sherlock stared up at the stars and felt _unmoored_. It brought to mind his honeymoon with John in Quebec, when they’d wrapped themselves in wool blankets and watched the stars for hours on end. Sherlock had needed to reach out to the frozen earth around him to assure himself that he was still bound by gravity. God, the stars: endless, infinite, high and cold and crystalline and fiery. It was more than awe-inspiring, watching the dust of the milky way light up the night sky; it was gorgeous, sublime, terrifying.

And now he felt the same, staring up at the painted stars on the ceiling, and all because a tiny hand had wrapped around his finger.

John stood behind him, cradling Sherlock’s arms as he held the baby at home for the first time; he felt John’s weary smile against his shoulderblade through the fabric of his shirt. “It’s something, isn’t it,” John murmured, voice thick and pleased.

“Just a reflex,” Sherlock murmured back, blinking furiously up at the ceiling. “Instinctive.”

“Mm,” John hummed into Sherlock’s ear, propping his chin on Sherlock’s shoulder; he had to lean on his toes to reach comfortably. “And yet.”

In the cradle of his arms, the baby slept peacefully. He held her tenderly, as befitted such precious cargo—afraid that she might break. She was warmer than he had expected. Denser, too: more _real_. Sherlock cleared his throat softly so as not to wake her. “And yet,” he agreed. He looked around the room, at walls the color of old books—the middle, not the edges—and the soft blankets and the vase of flowers and the mobile above the crib. The grey April light glinted off the silver ring on John’s finger. Swallowing, he ducked his head.

John unwound his arms and stepped in front of him, leaving a gentle hand on the back of his neck. “Are you okay?” he asked quietly.

A broken half-laugh was pulled from Sherlock’s lips. “I’m—happy,” he said. “I didn’t think I could be. But I am.”

The nursery was warm and soft, and books lined the shelves: parenting books and picture books and their old, comforting favorites that they would both pass on to their daughter. Sherlock had skimmed his fingertips lightly over the covers of the poetry books but decided against removing them, in the end. It might be that he couldn’t read T.S. Eliot without recalling his isolation and the diamond clarity and haze and pull of the drugs, but maybe—just maybe—he could layer over the bad memories with good. It could be enough.

“Well,” John said, looking soft and determined all at once, “I hope you’re prepared to stay that way. Forever, if I can help it.”

“I’ll try to bear it,” he said raggedly; they both ignored the tear that slid down his cheek. “I love you.”

“I love you,” John said; pressed a slight kiss to the corner of his mouth. The movement was just enough to wake the baby, who opened her eyes. Too young to be able to focus, of course, and yet her gaze pierced straight through Sherlock. After a moment of deliberation, she began to cry.

“Hungry, I suppose,” John said, already moving to the door. “I’ll heat up some formula.” He stepped into the stairwell before turning back around and throwing Sherlock a weary, genuine grin. “Welcome to the rest of our lives.”

 _The rest of our lives_. Her wails died down to a quiet hiccuping within a moment or two, and Sherlock allowed himself the indulgence of pressing a kiss into the soft down of her hair.

He looked forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so very much for reading! Love you all<3


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